David Obey: “I want to repeat a little history lesson. This graph shows that at the end of World War II our national debt, as a…”

“I want to repeat a little history lesson. This graph shows that at the end of World War II our national debt, as a percentage of our total national income, was more than 100 percent because we fought World War II first and thought about paying for it afterwards. If we had not done that, Hitler flags would be flying all over the world. That dropped under a succession of Presidents, Republican and Democrat, until the debt was down to about 23 percent of our total national income. Then it stalled out between, say, 1973 and 1979 with the two energy crises under President Ford and President Carter. President Reagan got elected. The Congress passed his budgets which doubled the defense spending on borrowed money and which cut taxes by very large amounts at the same time. As a result, the debt exploded as a percentage of our national income and in all other ways. We added over $4 trillion to the debt, and it was pushed back up to about 50 percent of our annual national income.”