How does the right wing keep a straight face?
I like data. Data is powerful. Data can be misused or misinterpreted, but it doesn’t lie. It has no agenda. It is what it is.
When I test rhetoric against data, I find some interesting dichotomies, and over the years this process has driven me from right of center to somewhat left of center.
Here’s a case in point. The right wing has long painted the Democrats as big spenders, eager to take the hard earned money from the honest, small business owning, risk taking entrepreneurs and give it to the lazy, shiftless, leeches of society through major handout programs and massive pork barrel programs of little benefit to the nation as a whole.
This continues even today, with a recent editorial by Peggy Noonan painting the GOP as the party of fiscal restraint.
“The GOP itself should be going forward with its philosophy, with the things it’s long stood for and, in some cases, newly rediscovered, and painting the broader picture of the implications of endless, compulsive high spending.”
Here’s the data. Taking the federal deficit as a % of GDP, and adding up the numbers for each President’s budget terms, the cumulative deficit numbers look like this*:
Admittedly, this is a somewhat blunt analysis, but however the analysis is done, the picture is clear: Democratic Presidents, on the whole, have been remarkably responsible (fiscally). Republican Presidents have been the “compulsive high spenders”.
Of course, this is not new, or news worthy, but it continues to amaze me that the right wing still genuinely believe that Democrats are fiscally irresponsible.
* I have not included Obama because these numbers are actual (not budget) and Obama has no actual numbers. He has proposed only one budget (although the expected deficit of nearly 10% of GDP would put him in the big spending category).
