STWR - Share The World's Resources

Americans have long been warned that running large, continuous deficits courts disaster. ‘We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time’, was the way Walter Mondale put it to the 1984 Democratic Convention, when the us government’s cumulative deficit was some $7 trillion less than it is today. Three years later, a spate of cartoons and op-eds would depict the 1987 stock-market crash as a vicious hangover; the just deserts of a wastrel nation. The ever-accumulating deficits so frightened the first President Bush that he famously reneged on his ‘read my lips’ promise not to raise taxes. In 1992, Ross Perot launched the most successful third-party presidential candidacy since Eugene Debs by making the rivers of red ink his central campaign issue. Clinton’s great boast was that he managed temporarily to close the government deficit, although the trade deficit continued to grow during his administration.

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment