Origin of Republican Deficits

From Brad Delong, in 1993 Treasury memo posted on blog, April 19, 2011:

In figure 1 the "presidential" and actual deficits are almost the same. Had the Congress been a rubber stamp and taken no action to change the president’s budget at all, the 1982–91 years would have seen total budget deficits more than ninety percent as large as actual deficits. Figure 1 shows us that the federal government has not run large budget deficits over the past decade because "Congress…rebuffed" presidential plans to control federal spending. Instead, the large deficits have been there from the beginning in presidential spending plans.

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Either way, the conclusion is the same: the U.S. has had large budget deficits over the past decade not because Congress has rejected presidential spending restrictions, but because large budget deficits have been implicit in every single year’s presidential spending plan. Congress has largely played a passive role: delivering by and large the level of spending that the president proposed.