The chart makes clear that it is too early to judge Obama on the percentage increase in national debt relative to GDP. But it is easy to see the record of his predecessors.
Matthew Yglesias articulates one of the cold hard facts about American conservatives:
The presence of a major ideological movement in the United States of America dedicated to the dual propositions that taxes must never go up, and that government expenditures don’t need to relate to government revenue in any real way as long as the Republican Party is in charge simply makes it almost impossible for the country to be governed in a responsible manner.