Surprisingly - given the traditional identification of Republicans with fiscal conservatism - it turns out that Democratic presidents have behaved more fiscally conservatively than Republicans. President Clinton receives top marks and President George W. Bush is at the bottom of the class, by a big margin.

The chart above shows the average annual growth rate of revenues minus the average growth rate of expenditures for each presidential term from Eisenhower through G.W. Bush. Each term is delineated as the four years following the presidential election year, except for the last, which includes only the first three of President G.W. Bush's four years, ending in 2003.

The black bars represent terms in which revenues on average grew faster than expenditures, so budget deficits were reduced. For example, in Clinton's second term, the annual growth rate of revenues was more than five percent greater than the average growth rate of spending, and the budget moved from deficit into surplus. The top three of the six presidential terms "in the black" occurred under Democrats, Clinton and Carter. In marked contrast, five of the seven presidential terms that saw budgets move deeper into the red were Republican terms. Surprisingly, perhaps, Ronald Reagan's first term, in which taxes were cut steeply, does not stand out among these. In fact, Reagan's two terms taken together did little to move the budget either way. In the first Reagan term, the budget deteriorated moderately, in the second, it improved moderately.

The presidential reign that stands out from all the rest is the current term of George W. Bush. None of the other presidential terms shows revenues growing even four percent slower than expenditures. In the first three years of the Bush administration, revenues have grown more than nine percent slower than expenditures.

With plans for further tax cuts (masked as savings incentives and God knows what else), no end in sight to the costly adventure in Iraq, and an expensive, yet deeply flawed new drug benefit for Medicare, it looks as though President Bush will continue to plunge the government to new lows in fiscal responsibility.