Bush went into office, saying he only wanted to cut taxes because we were running a surplus, never indicating he was straying from the Republican pounding post of balanced budgets. Then he got in office, and we all know what happened. Politicians know a lot of people are mad about this, that’s why both McCain and Obama are promising to work towards balancing the budget.

In McCain’s case, it’s pretty clear he’s bogus–he made the mistake of promising a definite date (2013 or whatever) and a definite plan, with math the experts can check and see as bogus. Obama, in contrast, doesn’t have anything so definite, and has been going around saying that though he wants to balance the budget and will do things to move in this direction, but who knows how long it will actually take. It would be very easy for him to forget all that and end up making the problem worse. He’s promising big spending increases (especially health care) and tax cuts for 95% of the population. He claims that this will be more than offset by spending cuts and tax increases in other areas, but it would be so easy to do all that half-heartedly, especially in the area of spending cuts. (The specific claim on taxes is that raising taxes on the rich will make the overall tax plan revenue neutral, according to one Obama advisor.)

The last few decades of experience suggest that the American political system isn’t very good at producing balanced budgets, and we have little reason to expect any given politician to produce a balanced budget. But could we maybe blame the Republicans? Some of our worst budget nonsense has been under Republican presidents, and the only president who’s produced a balanced budget in a very long time was Clinton, a Democrat. However, Clinton didn’t balance the budget because he had free reign to do whatever he wanted; he was working and triangulating with a Republican-controlled Congress.

Alternative hypothesis: what produces balanced budgets is not one party or the other, but a divided government. Almost all politicians have a tendency to: (1) Do fiscally irresponsible things and (2) Block the fiscally responsible things of their enemies. There’s some interesting questions about whether there’s any rational reason for this, at least from a politician’s point of view: maybe voters vote on the sort term, and don’t pay enough attention to the long term. Maybe voters are rational to do this, because the long-term fiscal health of the country is too uncertain to push politicians around on. Or maybe budget deficits are an opportunity for one group of constituents to buy stuff on the credit cards of the other guy’s group of constituents.

It’s very hard to know if any of that is right, though: we don’t have enough cases to go on. For now, I have to conclude that Obama probably wouldn’t be good for our country’s fiscal health, but it’s very hard to know with any confidence what he’ll do until he’s done it. (Oh and yes: I’m disgusted by the Sarah Palin pick, and I’m even more confident than I used to be that I won’t vote for him, even if the split-government effect would have some benefits. My current plan is to vote for Paris Hilton.)