Question: Which Presidents in the past 50 years did not have deficit spending?
Encyclopedia says…. of all the presidents in the last fifty years, exactly two of them didn’t have deficit spending–Carter and Clinton, neither of whom was a Republican.
Just for fun, heres another way to look at this, so which Presidents spent the most money while in office?
The first thing is to calculate the inflation-adjusted spending per capita. Then total up the entire amount spent under each president. We could rank presidents this way, but its unfair to people like FDR who spent a lot longer in office then did, say, Ford. So divide the total (inflation-adjusted per capita) by the number of years in office.
This gives a ranking based on who on average had the highest yearly spending. Everything is in 2008 dollars.
Based on current indicators it looks like Obama will top this list with $9400 per citizen per year.
Bush II 8900 – R
Bush I 8200 – R
Clinton 8000
Reagan 7500 – R
Carter 6600
Ford 6200 – R
Nixon 5400 – R
Johnson 4600
JFK 4000
Truman 3400
Eisenhower 3400 – R
FDR 2200
Wilson 700
Harding 500 – R
Hoover 400 – R
Coolidge 300 – R
T Roosevelt 200
Taft 200 – R
Republicans look pretty bad, but keep in mind this list does not take into account the actions of Congress. Regan spent a lot of money, yet he is now considered to have held the line on spending, which isn’t true.