USA News Hub

Then there is the debt limit, the legal cap on how much debt the government is allowed to accrue. It is not, as you’ve likely heard, a limit on how much the government can spend; Congress can approve the spending of $85 quadrillion and the debt limit has nothing to do with it — at least, that is, until it comes time to pay those bills. When the government doesn’t have the money to pay what Congress says it has to pay, it issues debt, up to that limit.

So. We are now once again at a point where the government has hit the limit. This didn’t used to happen very often; Congress would simply vote to increase the limit when the debt approached it. But these days it happens a lot, in part because the level of debt is rising and in part because politicians have discovered that hemming and hawing over raising the limit is a good way to get concessions or attention or both.

Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump

By “politicians,” of course, I almost exclusively mean “Republican politicians when the president is a Democrat.” And if you’ve checked the news recently, you are likely aware that this is the current situation. And so we have House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), agitating about their opposition to raising the debt limit.

Democrats, naturally, are quick to point out that McCarthy and his caucus had no obvious concerns about the debt limit when Donald Trump was president, a period during which the debt limit was mostly suspended. The government could just accrue more debt, and did. Then the limit kicked back in and so did the leverage it offered.

The Republicans who object to raising the debt limit often intertwine it with government spending; in other words, with the deficit. It’s pretty disingenuous, but it is hard to deny that talking about the debt limit allows them to effectively agitate about spending. After all, I started this article by differentiating the important terms since they are easy to conflate, intentionally or not.

But it raises the question: Which party is most responsible for the debt (and therefore the debt limit) being as high as it is?

There’s not really a clean way to answer that question, given how government spending works. Nonetheless, it’s instructive to look at how the debt has changed and which party was in power when it happened so that we might at least approximate the answer.

Below, you can see the change in the debt at the start of each Congress since 1993. The Treasury Department’s daily debt figures only go back to early 1993, so I included the latter half of that year (during which a new Congress began). I also included the little bit of this year so far, just for a treat.

By itself that doesn’t tell us much. So let us now flood the zone with additional information: the debt limit at the start and end of each Congress, control of the House and Senate and control of the White House. At the bottom, another bit of data: the percentage change in the debt during each Congress.

Now we’re getting somewhere. At bottom, for example, you can see that the biggest column — representing a nearly 32 percent increase in the debt, occurred with Democratic control of the House and Senate (the blue background to the column) and a Democratic president (the blue stripes). This was the Congress that began in 2009, the first of Barack Obama’s administration and one in which the government was trying to limit the negative effects of the recession that began 15 years ago. The prior Congress also saw a large increase in the debt, the third-largest increase indicated. That was the administration of George W. Bush similarly trying to address the economy, among other things.

The second-highest column was during Donald Trump’s administration: the government response to the coronavirus pandemic. Crises are expensive.

(Oh, by the way: Notice that the white line on the top graph, the one indicating the debt limit, used to sit well above the actual debt. Now the two lines run about even — except when the limit is lifted because it just makes everything easier.)

That’s all well and good, but it’s still hard to parse where culpability for the debt lies (to the extent that you might think that accruing debt is something for which one might feel culpable). If we simply partition out the increases in the debt by control of Congress and the presidency, we get something like this.

You can see that the largest circle sits next to a Congress where Democrats controlled the House, Republicans controlled the Senate and a Republican was in the White House. That was the Congress that ran from 2019 to 2021, the one affected by the pandemic. Mind you, the debt had already increased by $1.5 trillion from the start of that Congress to March 1, 2020, a bigger jump than in any Congress before 2009. But the debt went on to climb another $4.3 trillion, an increase that would have been the largest jump by itself.

Of course, the total debt was much lower at the beginning of 2009. If we consider relative increases — the increase in the debt relative to debt overall — the picture shifts. The 2019 to 2021 Congress saw a big jump, but so did the Congress that began in 2009, the recession one. And so did the 2007 to 2009 Congress, shown at upper right.

If we categorize each Congress by the composition of the House and Senate, overlay the presidency and then consider both the actual and relative increases in the debt, we get this table. It is arranged from the least average increase in the debt to the most — a Congress in which Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate and White House.

Situations like the current one — precisely the opposite of that — yield the second-lowest average relative increases. They also have accrued the fourth-largest cumulative increase in the debt.

We have our answer: Whose fault is the debt? Everyone, really. Not useful for political jockeying, but important to know.