To put another slant on things. At current interest rates, borrowing money ain't such a bad decision. The interest expense of building infrastructure in many cases will be less than the annual income it generates.
Governments record their expenditures as costs. But sometimes they are building community assets. By investing in roads, you enable the exchange of goods. By investing in science, you build the next generation of invention.
So you cannot simply assume that deficits are a measure of failure. Or indeed, as mentioned in a previous post, that an annual deficit indicates an increase in debt relative to GDP.
To measure GOP fiscal responsibility by the size of the deficit inverts the cart and the horse. The market collapse in 2008 was the disease. The increasing government debt was a part of the cure. One that the US can afford well enough, as expressed by the annual interest expense the US bears to support it.
Generally speaking, however, economic growth during Republican administrations has been lower than it has been under Democratic ones. Whether that is a coincidence or not is up to economists to decipher. But clearly the worst economic calamities in the last century have occurred when financial regulation was reduced - in the 1920s and the 2000s. My view is that the philosophy that markets require little or no regulation is the source of the abuses that cause the harms that end up costing society an arm and a leg. I would say the same thing about excessive regulation also, but this is much rarer in the US (I can't think of an economic catastrophe that resulted from it).
“The U.S. economy not only grows faster, according to real GDP and other measures, during Democratic versus Republican presidencies, it also produces more jobs, lowers the unemployment rate, generates higher corporate profits and investment, and turns in higher stock market returns. Indeed, it outperforms under almost all standard macroeconomic metrics.” - Alan Blinder and Mark Watson
http://fortune.com/2014/07/29/economic-growth-democratic-presidents/
The essential ingredient of property rights is restriction. The law tells me to respect your fence, which means your property right is a restriction of my freedom to behave/roam as I wish. Maybe the policy of self-regulation is the key factor underlying Republican economic woes. Third party management of markets maintains their integrity and hence the value of property. Assuming this is unimportant - that markets operate efficiently without intervention by trusted actors - perhaps generates the harms that deliver GOP under-performance.
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