For almost two centuries the bipartisan goal of balancing the budget imposed pressure on elected officials to link their spending and tax policies. Even when those policies began to diverge in the Reagan administration, few elected officials in either party contested the ideal of a balanced budget. That popular goal created the political framework for bipartisan agreements to raise taxes during the Reagan administration after 1981 and to better align federal spending and revenues in 1990 and 1997. Since 2000, leaders in both parties have subordinated the ideal of balanced budgets to other policy goals, and routine borrowing now continues even as the smoke clears from the extraordinary borrowing used to finance two wars and the response to the Great Recession.