The Six Presidents Causing U.S. Bankruptcy
By Egon von Greyerz
Posted October 4, 2016
Since Reagan came to power in 1981, the U.S. has had a total of five presidents who have spent ever increasing amounts of money to hang on to power and buy votes.
https://dailyreckoning.com/six-presidents-causing-u-s-bankruptcy/
The U.S. economy showed natural growth without deficit spending until 1960. At that point, heavier involvement by the U.S. in the Vietnam war created the initial deficits. As Eisenhower handed over to Kennedy in 1961, U.S. debt was only $286 billion. Then 20 years later during the first year of Reagan’s presidency, U.S. debt reached the staggering sum of $1 trillion.
Reagan was hailed as a superb president primarily because he (like Thatcher in the U.K.) assumed power at the bottom of the economic and stock market cycles. So they were lucky to get in at the right time. But few people realise that Reagan achieved this by almost tripling debt from $0.9 trillion to $2,6T.
So in eight years Reagan incurred $1.7T of debt which is almost twice what all the presidents before him had incurred since 1789. And from then on every single president continued on the neck braking deficit course. Most people believed that Clinton managed the U.S. economy particularly well and created surpluses for the first time in 35 years.
But what the Clinton administration succeeded particularly well with was to cook the books rather than to create surpluses. Because in every single year of the Clinton administration, federal debt increased in spite of the fact that budget surpluses were shown. And by the time Clinton left in 2001, he had managed to add another $1.6T debt to make the total $5.7T.