Lyndon Johnson (Democrat) was elected president in 1964 in a landslide. He created Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, federal funding for public schools, federal college grants, the school breakfast program, and a lot of other very expensive ‘Great Society’ programs, all while fighting a major war in Vietnam, and without raising taxes to pay for any of this. When the bills came due for the war and Johnson’s Great Society programs, taxes went up, so we elected Ronald Reagan (Republican) in a landslide. Reagan promised (and delivered) big tax cuts, but without getting rid of or even cutting back any of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Predictably, the federal deficit skyrocketed. In the 8 years that Reagan was president, total Federal debt tripled.
WHY DO WE ELECT DEMOCRATS? WHY DO WE ELECT REPUBLICANS?
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I have a theory about this. We elect Democrats because we want the stuff they promise to give us, and then we elect Republicans when we get the bill for that stuff and don’t want to pay it. We don’t want to give up the stuff that we got from the Democrats. We just don’t want to pay for it.
The problem isn’t the Democrats or the Republicans. It’s us. We want stuff from the government, expensive stuff, but we don’t want to pay for it. Every democracy around the world seems to have this same problem. After touring America in 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘Democracy works, but only until the people realize that they hold the keys to the Treasury.’