The Party of Fiscal Responsibility Has Been Bleeding America Dry for Fifty Years
From Nixon's crimes to Bush's wars, the exposed scaffolding of GOP governance: tripled debts, upward-flowing wealth, and children left behind—all while preaching austerity for everyone else
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There is an American amnesia that allows the Republican Party to present itself, election after election, as the guardian of fiscal responsibility, law and order, and national strength. The actual record tells a different story entirely. From Nixon through the second Bush, Republican presidents exposed the nation to a recurring pattern so consistent it begins to look less like coincidence than constitutional defect: the lawbreaking, the scandal, the wars launched on dubious pretenses, the deficits accumulated while preaching austerity, the systematic unraveling of the social contract in service of those who needed no assistance whatsoever. If this is what responsible governance looks like, one shudders to imagine the alternative.
Start with the simple matter of following the law, since Republicans have made such theater of demanding it from everyone else. Nixon’s men went to prison in droves—the burglary, the wiretapping, the obstruction of justice, the whole pathological apparatus of a president so convinced of his enemies’ malevolence that he became the thing he feared. Reagan’s administration produced eleven criminal convictions in the Iran-Contra affair, a scandal in which officials sold weapons to a hostile nation under embargo, funneled the proceeds to Central American rebels in direct violation of congressional statute, and then lied about all of it with the relaxed confidence of men who understood that accountability was for other people. George H.W. Bush confirmed this understanding by pardoning the key conspirators before they could testify about what he himself knew. George W. Bush’s administration authorized torture, ran secret prisons, conducted warrantless surveillance on American citizens, and built a legal black hole at Guantánamo Bay where men could be held forever without charge or trial. The physical evidence of Abu Ghraib—those photographs of grinning soldiers beside their hooded, brutalized captives—will stain the American image for generations. This is the party of law and order.
And then there was Gerald Ford, the only man to occupy the Oval Office without a single American having voted for him—not as president, not as vice president, not for anything at all. Ford was not, by most accounts, a bad man. He was a genial Midwesterner, a former football player, a creature of the House who had risen through congeniality rather than cunning. He told the country that our long national nightmare was over, and perhaps he even believed that a pardon would heal wounds rather than salt them. But what Gerald Ford did on September 8, 1974, when he granted Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes he might have committed, was not an act of healing. It was the establishment of a precedent that would echo through the next half-century of American politics: Republican presidents do not face consequences.
Consider what Ford’s pardon actually accomplished. Nixon had authorized burglaries, ordered illegal wiretaps, obstructed justice, suborned perjury, and abused the powers of the federal government to punish his enemies. His men went to prison. His attorney general went to prison. His chief of staff, his domestic policy advisor, his counsel—prison, prison, prison. But Nixon himself retired to San Clemente, collected his pension, wrote his memoirs, and was gradually rehabilitated into an elder statesman, consulted by subsequent presidents and eulogized upon his death as a complex figure who had “opened China.” The crimes for which his subordinates served time simply evaporated for the man who ordered them.
Ford’s defenders argued then, and argue still, that a trial would have torn the country apart, that the nation needed to move forward, that the spectacle of a former president in the dock would have been too destabilizing to bear. But what Ford actually taught every Republican who followed was something far more corrosive: the system will protect its own. Break the law in service of conservative power, and there will be no reckoning. The gentleman’s agreement holds.
Watch how the lesson was learned. Reagan’s men sold weapons to a hostile nation and funneled the proceeds to foreign rebels in direct violation of congressional law. Eleven administration officials were convicted. Reagan claimed not to remember. And then George H.W. Bush—himself implicated, with a trial approaching that might have revealed what he knew—pardoned the key conspirators on Christmas Eve 1992, killing the investigation dead. No consequences. George W. Bush authorized torture, warrantless surveillance, and a war based on manipulated intelligence. His administration lawyers wrote memos redefining torture as not-torture. When Obama took office, he announced that we needed to “look forward, not backward.” No investigations. No prosecutions. No consequences.
The pattern is not coincidence; it is infrastructure. Ford built the off-ramp, and every Republican president since has known it exists. You can wage illegal wars, you can shred the Constitution, you can orchestrate burglaries and cover-ups and the sale of arms to enemies—and at the end of it all, someone will appear to explain that the nation must heal, that prosecution would be too divisive, that we are better than this. The nation is always healing from Republican crimes, never holding anyone accountable for them. Democrats, meanwhile, get impeached for lying about sex.
Now consider the money, since Republicans have built their brand on the claim that Democrats are the reckless spenders. When Reagan took office, the national debt stood at roughly nine hundred billion dollars—the accumulated borrowing of every president from Washington through Carter. Reagan tripled it. He promised that tax cuts would pay for themselves through growth. They did not. George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton—an actual surplus, black ink, the thing Republicans claimed to want—and incinerated it with tax cuts, unfunded wars, and a Medicare prescription drug benefit that was essentially a transfer payment to pharmaceutical companies. He doubled the debt. These are not matters of interpretation. These are numbers. The Republican Party has increased the national debt more dramatically than Democrats in every comparable period, while simultaneously gutting the programs that debt might have funded—education, infrastructure, healthcare, the basic investments that create opportunity and build a middle class. The deficits purchased nothing but upper-bracket tax relief and military hardware. The fiscal conservatism was for everyone else.
Then there are the wars, because Republican presidents do so love a war. Nixon inherited Vietnam and expanded it secretly into Cambodia, bombing a neutral nation for more than a year without bothering to inform Congress. Reagan funded proxy conflicts across Central America and backed Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, including when Hussein used chemical weapons on his own people—a crime that would later be cited to justify invading him once he’d outlived his usefulness. Bush Senior gave us the Gulf War, which achieved its military objectives in a hundred hours and established a permanent American military presence in the Middle East, a presence that would prove considerably more durable than the rationale for it. And Bush Junior gave us Iraq. The Iraq War was sold on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, launched with planning so inadequate that officials apparently expected to be greeted as liberators and home by Christmas, and conducted with a brutality that produced both Abu Ghraib and the conditions for ISIS to emerge from the wreckage. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. More than four thousand American service members came home in coffins. The war cost trillions, destabilized a region, and created problems we are still managing two decades later. This is what strength looks like, apparently.
What unites these threads—the scandals, the debt, the wars—is a consistent orientation toward power and its prerogatives. Republican governance in this era has operated on the premise that rules apply to other people. Congress prohibits funding the Contras? Find a workaround through illegal arms sales. Treaties ban torture? Redefine torture. The Constitution requires congressional authorization for war? Claim inherent executive authority and dare anyone to stop you. This is not conservative governance in any meaningful sense. It is the politics of impunity, dressed up in flag pins and tough talk.
Meanwhile, the domestic legacy has been equally consistent: a systematic dismantling of the structures that enabled postwar prosperity. Reagan crushed the unions, beginning with the air traffic controllers, and established the template that labor exists to be disciplined rather than empowered. He slashed social programs while the wealth of the top percentiles soared. His response to the AIDS crisis was silence and mockery—years of inaction while young men died by the thousands, because the victims were gay and didn’t vote Republican anyway. The savings and loan industry was deregulated and promptly collapsed, sticking taxpayers with a hundred-thirty-billion-dollar bailout. This was the template for what would come later: liberate the finance industry from oversight, let it run wild, and hand the bill to the public when the inevitable happens.
Bush Junior completed the project. His administration’s regulatory philosophy—the fox not merely guarding the henhouse but actively denying that foxes eat chickens—allowed the predatory lending and speculative excess that produced the 2008 financial crisis. When the economy collapsed, when millions lost their homes and their savings and their jobs, when the entire global financial system teetered on the edge of catastrophe, the president who had presided over it all offered the observation that Wall Street got drunk. This from the man who’d been pouring the drinks.
The wealth, meanwhile, flowed relentlessly upward. In 1980, the top 1 percent held roughly 25 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 2024, that figure had risen to over 30 percent, while the bottom 50 percent—half of all Americans—held just 2.5 percent. The middle class watched its share of national wealth decline from 32 percent to 27 percent over the same period. Since 1980, wealth for the top 1 percent grew by approximately 650 percent. For the middle class, it grew by 135 percent—less than one-fifth the rate. For the bottom half of Americans, there was effectively zero net wealth growth between 1989 and 2018. This is not an accident. This is the intended outcome of policies that cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated industries that preyed on working people, and systematically weakened the institutions—unions, public education, the social safety net—that once gave ordinary Americans a fighting chance.
And the children? The children have paid the price for all of it. Child poverty in America rose from 14 percent when Nixon took office to nearly 23 percent by 1993—after twelve years of Reagan and Bush. It fell under Clinton, rose again under the second Bush, and reached 22 percent during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The pattern is unmistakable: under Democratic presidents, child poverty has fallen by a cumulative 19.7 percentage points since 1960. Under Republican presidents, it has risen by 5.1 percentage points. Kennedy and Johnson’s War on Poverty cut child poverty nearly in half. Reagan’s cuts reversed a decade of progress. Clinton’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit drove rates down again. And then came 2021, when the expanded Child Tax Credit—passed with zero Republican votes—cut child poverty to a historic low of 5.2 percent. When Republicans blocked its renewal, child poverty more than doubled.
Set this record against the Democrats who bracketed and interrupted it, and the contrast is difficult to explain away. Jimmy Carter started no wars and negotiated the Camp David Accords, the most significant Middle East peace agreement in half a century. His administration was ethically pristine if sometimes politically inept. Bill Clinton balanced the budget—actually balanced it, producing surpluses—while presiding over the creation of twenty-two million jobs and rising incomes across all brackets. He was impeached for lying about sex, a personal disgrace and an abuse of his position, but not a crime against the republic. Barack Obama inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, stabilized it, extended health coverage to twenty million uninsured Americans, ended the Iraq War, found and killed Osama bin Laden, and served eight years without a single criminal indictment of a senior official. Joe Biden ended the twenty-year Afghanistan War and passed the largest infrastructure and climate investments in American history. Neither started new wars.
One can argue about policy. One can dispute priorities and disagree about the proper size of government. But the basic question of whether an administration followed the law, avoided catastrophic military adventures, and left the country’s finances in better shape than it found them—these are not ideological matters. They are matters of record. And the record is damning.
The Republican Party has somehow convinced a substantial portion of the American electorate that it represents fiscal discipline, respect for law, and steady global leadership. The evidence suggests the opposite: that GOP governance since Nixon has meant corruption prosecuted or pardoned, debts accumulated while social investments were slashed, and wars launched with inadequate justification and less planning. The party of personal responsibility has consistently evaded it. The party of limited government has expanded executive power beyond recognition. The party of strength has mired the nation in unwinnable conflicts and left others to clean up the mess.
Ford himself seemed to understand, eventually, what he had done. In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library awarded him its Profile in Courage Award for the pardon, on the theory that it had taken political bravery to sacrifice his own election prospects for the good of the country. Perhaps. But courage in service of a terrible decision is not wisdom. What Ford gave Nixon was not closure but permission—permission that has been claimed by every Republican administration since, permission that has corroded the very notion that presidents are subject to law. The long national nightmare, it turned out, was just beginning.
This is not a case that requires exaggeration or partisan overreach. It simply requires looking at what actually happened—the exposed scaffolding of half a century, visible to anyone willing to see it. The question is not whether the pattern exists. The question is why so many Americans have chosen not to notice.
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THE ADELSONS: A Family Tragedy in Three Acts
Many years ago, when I ran Capital Region Special Surgery, one of our ENT surgeons appeared in my doorway late one afternoon, still in scrubs. Dr. Awwad closed the door with the deliberate care of someone carrying gossip too explosive for hallways.
He had news, he said. But I had to keep it secret.
A new physician at a rival practice across town—Dr. Robert Adelson—was about to become infamous. His mother was under investigation for hiring someone to murder her son-in-law.
Dr. Awwad was vibrating with the kind of energy people get when someone else’s catastrophe arrives gift-wrapped as entertainment.
I had a different reaction.
My father was accused and convicted of murder in Boston in the late 1940s, long before I was born. It’s one of those family facts that sits in the background like furniture you’ve stopped noticing. But it taught me something most people never learn: murder doesn’t just happen to a family. It becomes part of the architecture. It shapes everything that comes after in ways both obvious and invisible.
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The child poverty data is pretty striking when laid out across administrations. Watching it fall to 5.2% with the expanded tax credit then jump back when renewal was blocked really underlines how policy design affects outcomes faster than most people realize. The contrast between rhetoric around fiscal responsibility and the actual debt accumulation reminds me of how corporate turnaround consultants talk a big game abot cost control but often just strip assets and leave debt behind.