James Fallows posts an edifying graph from The New York Times:
Look, this is the whole strategy behind "starve the beast." Run up huge deficits, then blame them on a Democrat and use them as an excuse to eviscerate the social safety net. Until the current administration, though, no one could argue that it was actually working.
As a matter of pure partisanship, though, it's telling that the deficit became a huge issue to Republicans only after Bush ran up more than $5 trillion in debt.
