The national debt hit yet another record on Wednesday, and political leaders mostly yawned.
It wasn’t always this way. Deficits and debt were among the driving issues of the 1992 presidential campaign, nearly upending national politics.
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Paul Tsongas, the former liberal senator from Massachusetts, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on a platform of deficit reduction. He later teamed up with Sen. Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican, to form the Concord Coalition, which remains an important voice for budgetary discipline to this day.
Texas billionaire Ross Perot ran one of the strongest independent or third-party presidential campaigns in history, largely on the strength of getting the deficit under control. He won nearly a fifth of the popular vote doing infomercials with those little budget charts.
Democratic presidential front-runner Bill Clinton often sounded like he was running to the right of the Republicans on the deficit, even though he promised all kinds of new “investments” in the form of additional government spending.
While some of this blue-party aversion to red ink and enthusiasm for green eyeshades was simply an effort to roll back Republican tax cuts, as the incumbent president and third candidate in that race, George H.W. Bush, had agreed to do in 1990 in a politically devastating violation of his “read my lips” pledge from the previous campaign. Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh used to call Tsongas “Senator Tax on Gas.”
Yet there was a genuine bipartisan consensus at that time that the deficit was too big and the federal government was borrowing too much.
The federal budget deficit that year was a little over $290 billion, a record at the time. The national debt was a tenth of what it is now.
When the political neophyte Perot was challenged on his lack of experience in government, he shot back, “I don’t have any experience in running up a $4 trillion debt.”
As the national debt careens past $40 trillion, there doesn’t seem to be any major constituency clamoring for fiscal responsibility.
The federal budget was last balanced 25 years ago, after then-President Clinton and a Republican-controlled Congress delivered surpluses dating back to 1998. Before that, it had last been balanced in 1969.
For the past decade, the annual deficit has never dipped below $500 billion. The last time it was below $1 trillion, a dollar amount it took until 1987 for the entire federal budget to reach, was 2019. But just barely: the deficit that year was $984 billion, years after the Great Recession, months before the pandemic began, with no major wars ongoing (there were still about 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan at the time).
Even after the pandemic ended, the deficit never fell below $1.3 trillion a single year former President Joe Biden was in office. It has yet to be less than $1.8 trillion in President Donald Trump’s second, nonconsecutive term.
The economy is also much larger, and there is a larger context to these dollar amounts. The financial crisis and COVID-19 would have enlarged spending, deficits, and debt under virtually any president or Congress that could have realistically been elected.
Nevertheless, the bipartisan tolerance for deficits has surely grown over the years. When Dick Cheney was vice president, he is said to have told President George W. Bush that “deficits don’t matter.” Cheney invoked Ronald Reagan, who had more success cutting taxes than spending. But Reagan whipped stagflation, which today’s debt crisis could revive.
Centrist Democrats and Republican deficit hawks have never been more marginalized. The fiscally conservative Tea Party of a decade ago, which viewed Paul Ryan as a dangerous spendthrift, has given way to a comparable socialist rebellion among Democrats. Not even inflation hitting a 41-year high under Biden tempered enthusiasm for monetary expansion and deficit spending.
A $40 trillion national debt, a threshold reached on Clinton’s 80th birthday, just hasn’t inspired the kind of political backlash it did less than 35 years ago. In fact, Clinton-style politics and fiscal policy are decidedly out of vogue in today’s Democratic Party. And Clinton is the only one of those 1992 White House contenders — including Bush, Perot, and Tsongas — who is still alive.
Looming Social Security insolvency, projected for 2032, doesn’t appear to have created any greater urgency.
Washington is now full of politicians who could best Perot with their experience running up $4 trillion in just a couple of years. It just no longer merits much notice. In 2026, $40 trillion is the going rate.
