New Data: Congress Reduced Reagan's Budgets slightly.
"September 20, 2010. OK, I finally tracked down exactly what Congress did. There were a few scattered cites on the web to a mysterious House report from 1992, but I could never find it, so I was using ultra-conservative data to be cautious.
But a few days ago, I pulled together my best clues and wrote to the help desk at the Library of Congress. They nailed it in less than a day. Amazing. There is no such report, but they found a table with that name that is published annually and has all the budget results going back to the 1920s or so.
Here it is from the government printing office.
The upshot is that Congress actually appropriated less than Reagan's budget requests on average and also less then G.H.W. Bush's. Only by about 0.5%, but Congress shares no blame with Reagan.
I also checked stories in
Time magazine and the NYTs for the first Reagan budget, which the supply-siders and Reaganites claim was the big over-run by Congress. Totally wrong. First of all the Senate (with equal say) was Republican, and second, lots of the Southern Dems sided with Reagan and they massacred the more liberal Dems. This budget was only 1/2 a percent high, and it was the Republicans' that did it. The Dems lost.
Was it Really the Democratic Congress?
Reagan won the 1980 presidential election claiming the national debt was at an all time high of $1 trillion, and he would bring it down. It was almost that high, but compared to the size of the American economy it was the smallest it had been in over 50 years. It just looked big because of inflation, but Reagan either did not understand inflation or enjoyed his little deception.
Beyond dispute is the fact that eight years later, when he left office, the debt was $2.6 trillion. "When a conservative says it is bad for the government to spend more than it takes in, he is simply showing the same common sense that tells him to come in out of the rain." (Reagan, 1977) By his own standard, he showed an amazing lack of common sense.
Congress Did Not Cause Reagan's Debt