Why the House matters

Here's a graph I made of US Gross Debt as a percentage of GDP, graphed over time (bar graph). Over the top, I've put in the balance of power in the House and Senate, listed as "Full Dem", "Full Rep" or "Split", and when it was split, I labeled the House.



You can see why the House is so important. While the Republicans held the House, the budget didn't explode. Whenever the Dems held the House, it did.

A graphic reminder that all spending bills originate in the House.

As an interesting side note, there is a reason I started the graph in 1981; because, that's the year everything changed. Prior to that, we'd been on a slow decline in Debt (or was it a GDP increase?) even though everything was held by Democrats. We were coming down from the high war years (click for the not-distorted-by-Blogger's-compression version.) In 1981 all hell breaks loose: