While Republicans have spent the past 40 years using the late President Jimmy Carter as a political punching bag — mainly on the economy and foreign policy — one thing you didn’t hear them attacking is Carter’s fiscal record.
There’s a reason for that. That’s because the numbers show no Republican president has come close to Carter in dealing with the budget.
While Carter never had a balanced budget, he only ran up $227 billion in new deficits in his four years in office.
Let me repeat that. Carter had just $227 billion in deficits. Total.
These days, Uncle Sam routinely sees monthly deficits which are over $200 billion. For example, President-elect Donald Trump had 13 of those months during his first term in office. Compare that to Carter, whose worst yearly deficit was $74 billion. Admittedly, the budget is much larger now, but the choices are the same.
Lawmakers in both parties would die for a federal budget deficit of only $74 billion in 2025. Instead, the deficit this year may be closer to $2 trillion again, as neither side seems interested in balancing the books.
Since the voters sent Carter back to Plains in the 1980 election, the GOP has become especially good at cutting taxes, but not very good at cuts in federal spending.
While Ronald Reagan enacted tax cuts and sternly criticized Carter for not balancing the budget, Reagan never came close to a surplus in his two terms, leaving office with yearly deficits of around $150 billion.
Arriving in the White House with Bill Clinton’s budget surplus, George W. Bush cut taxes, but never reined in spending. Bush’s final year was marked by a deficit of close to $500 billion.
Following the example of Reagan and Bush, Trump cut taxes — but didn’t hold back on spending — running up nearly $8 trillion in new debt.
For his return to the Oval Office, Trump and Republicans in Congress have talked a lot about more tax cuts, but the details about spending cuts remain somewhat of a GOP mystery on Capitol Hill.
We all know that it sounds good to cut waste, fraud and abuse — along with ‘woke’ spending — but that won’t come close to balancing the budget. It will take difficult — and maybe unpopular — decisions by Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill.
You might be hard pressed to find two more different people who served as president of the United States than Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump.
Trump now gets a second chance on the federal budget. Will it be a repeat of his first term? Or can Trump be more like Jimmy Carter?
Jamie Dupree has covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C., since the Reagan administration. His column appears weekly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more, check out his Capitol Hill newsletter at http://jamiedupree.substack.com
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