Thirty-three major tax laws laid against what the Treasury actually collected, what the government actually spent, and what it owed at the end of each year. The legislation panel, the money panel and the party-control band share one timeline, so a bill sits directly under the years it was meant to change — and above whoever was in charge when it passed.
Three strata, one clock. The top is the money. The middle is the law: each stem marks a bill at its year of enactment, dropping below the line for a net tax cut and rising above it for a net increase, with stem length the revenue effect as a share of GDP. The bottom is who held the pen.
Filled markers are Treasury's own scoring of each bill (Office of Tax Analysis, Working Paper 81), which runs through 2013. Hollow markers from 2015 on are the ten-year congressional score spread evenly across its window — a rougher figure on a different basis, shown so the recent record isn't a blank.
Sign conventions bite twice. The 2010 extension and the 2012 Taxpayer Relief Act are scored against a law in which the Bush-era rates had already expired, so both register as very large cuts. Measured against the taxes people were actually paying, ATRA was an increase on top earners. Both readings are in the table below.
Fiscal years, which since 1977 have run October through September. Debt is the total outstanding on the last day of the year, and gross debt includes what the government owes its own trust funds — roughly $7 trillion of the 2025 figure.
What counts as major is Treasury's own list, which is why one large revenue measure is absent: the Social Security Amendments of 1977, a phased payroll-rate and wage-base increase. Treasury never scored it alongside the rest, so there is no comparable figure to plot.
The control band runs on calendar years while everything above it runs on fiscal years, because that is how power actually changes hands — a Congress convenes in early January, a president is sworn in on the 20th. Runs are drawn to the day, so the Senate's handovers in 2001 appear as the slivers they were: Democratic for seventeen days under Gore's tie-break, Republican under Cheney's from 20 January, then Democratic again from 6 June when Jeffords left the party. Unified marks the stretches when one party held all three at once — eight of them in fifty-six years, covering about a third of the period.
Revenue effect in the first full year and averaged over the first four, as a share of GDP. Negative is a tax cut. Rows from 2015 on carry a ten-year score instead, annualized.
| Year | Law | Direction | Yr 1 (% GDP) | 4-yr avg (% GDP) | 10-yr score | Note |
|---|
| FY | Receipts ($B) | Outlays ($B) | Surplus / deficit ($B) | Gross debt ($B) | Debt held by public ($B) | Receipts % GDP | Outlays % GDP | Gross debt % GDP | President | House | Senate |
|---|