Party Trifecta Is The Exception, Not The Rule
That said, Democratic presidents are more likely to work with a Democratic Congress than Republican presidents are to work with a Republican Congress. Check out this chart for details. Since 1945, all five Democratic presidents have had a trifecta for at least one two-year session of Congress. Republican presidents? Only George W. Bush.
Why? And what does this mean for the cumulative gross federal debt?
Since the 1944 election, voters have tended to send Democrats to Congress and Republicans to the White House: we've had Republican presidents for 36 years and Democratic presidents for 28 years.
Yet the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1949 to 1993, when the Republican party sailed in on Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. (A contract not fulfilled, by the way, but that's another story.) Republicans have controlled the House only seven times since the 1944 election.
Democrats have controlled the Senate more sessions (22) than Republicans have (10), but they haven't had a long-term (multi-session) lock on the Senate since 1994.
The Great Society
The longest Democratic trifecta was 1961-1968, the era of JFK and LBJ and the Great Society. See why both fiscal and social conservatives might worry about another trifecta?
One good thing about that period is that gross national debt as a percent of GDP went down, despite Johnson's guns-and-butter policies. One reason: we had been focused on paying off the debt incurred in WWII. In 1950, the federal debt was 90% of GDP.
And the Democratic Congress and JFK/LBJ White House was somewhat dedicated to paying off WWII debt, although, per the data below, top tier tax rates started to go down on their watch. There was a little bump in 1968 in response to rising debt due to Vietnam. Remember, that top rate is only on part of income and affected a very very small percentage of Americans.
- 1951 - low 20.4%, high of 91%
- 1952-1953 - low 22.2%, high of 92%
- 1954-1963 - low 20%, high of 91%
- 1964 - low 16%, high of 77%
- 1965-1967 - low 14%, high of 70%
- 1968 - low 14%, high of 75.25%
While that Democratic Congress was working on paying off WWII debt, it was also focused on expansive, and costly, social policies like Medicare, Medicaid, Society Security, Head Start, School Lunch/Breakfast, etc. One could argue that we are living with the long-term costs of that optimistic legacy. In other words, programs that made up the Great Society vision didn't cost much then, they were new!
Today these programs have grown to encompass a large portion of the non-discretionary federal budget (entitlements). And, with the exception of the elderly and children under 18, we haven't made much progress in our "War on Poverty." One example: the life expectancy at birth (72) for an infant born in Washington, D.C. is comparable to that of a child born in Jordan (72), China (71.8) or Brazil (71.8).
Republicans held the trifecta from 2003-2006, the middle of George W. Bush's administration. What happened to tax rates, and the level of federal debt, on their watch? Tax rates down; deficits and debt, not surprisingly, up.
- 1993-2000 - 5 brackets - low of 15% to high of 39.6%
- 2001 - 5 brackets - low of 15% to high of 39.1%
- 2002 - 6 brackets - low of 10% to high of 38.6%
- 2003-2008 - 6 brackets - low of 10% to high of 35%
And The Debt
Today's debt has ballooned, a legacy of Ronald Reagan's expanded defense spending and Bush's excursions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for decades there been no serious Congressional effort to pay it down. Or to pay back what Congress has borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund in the years since Alan Greenspan suggested to Reagan that employer contributions must increase to forestall the future equivalence of bankruptcy.
There is little rhetoric of fiscal conservatism coming from the mouths of any candidates running for Congress or the White House, regardless of party. If the Republicans -- known as being the party of fiscal conservatism -- were so fiscally irresponsible when they held a trifecta, what can we expect from the Democratic Party, known for "spreading the wealth around"?
And before you point to FDR, remember that the U.S. economy did not recover from the Great Depression until we entered World War II, and began the era of the military-industrial complex.
See