Alternative history

The next chart shows what would have happened if Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush did not reduce the tax rates.

The debt would have been comfortably below 20 percent of GDP during the Clinton administration and near-zero when Barack Obama became president. We can safely assume that the bulk of the current national debt was created by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and a Congress more concerned about reducing the tax rate on the wealthy than the national debt.