There’s nothing mysterious about the greater fiscal responsibility of the Democrats. Since the Dems believe that the Federal government has a significant role to play, they have a built-in interest in keeping it solvent. Very conservative Republicans, in contrast, would be perfectly happy to bankrupt the Federal government as a way of destroying the entitlement programs and the less thoughtful Republicans went along with the game because it was politically profitable. Mostly it was just a question of “slopping the hogs” as Reagan’s budget director put it. Gutting social programs would have been political suicide for Reagan or BushII so the administration cheerfully combined huge tax cuts for the very richest people with enormous increases in the defense budget and put off the reckoning by running up the debt.
I don’t give full credit to Clinton for the prosperity of the 90s or full blame to the lesser Bush for the mediocre economic performance of the Oughts. Lots of other factors play into how the economy performs. During the Clinton years, for example, computer technology finally turned out to be a huge economic plus; and real growth (as opposed to the series of bubbles we’ve experienced since the 70s) has been hard to come by in part because of the inexorable rise of petroleum prices. Bad policy can certainly make things worse, though; and no matter how much you try to argue it away, the Bush tax cuts did put a hole in the budget long before Obama came along to pick up the pieces of an incompetent administration.
