The United States government is the reflection of a not-so-delicate fusion of private and public interests. As such, the monies collected and spent by the federal government stand as a central political issue to those interests. Since our country's inception, it has been a structural fixture of the American political scene that the party or interest, movement or person controlling the federal government's spending also exerts a dominant influence over the nation's social agenda. However, a crisis now looms over the political process, threatening that status quo; it is a crisis that asks the body politic this question: Why, since the presidency of Richard M. Nixon (circa 1970), have twenty-five years of successive federal budgets been so doggedly in the red that the country is now five trillion dollars in debt? According to one school of thinking on the matter, runaway social programs must shoulder the lion's share of responsibility for this liability. Other critics of federal spending blame excessive regulation for being a brake on the American economy and, therefore, responsible for a shortfall in government revenues. Still others, disillusioned with the political process, fault America's two major parties, Republican and Democrat, accusing both of spending more time fighting between themselves than in providing responsible economic legislation. Other arguments are offered as well; still, on examination it can be seen that, indeed, mismanaged social programs, ill-conceived regulatory legislation and political-infighting account for the major blame in creating the massive debt now burdening the federal government.
It is a relatively recent problem. Spurred on by the final years of the Vietnam War and an economic earthquake caused by the aggressive emergence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter could not stem a spiralling cycle of recession/inflation - stagflation - that sa...