Carter did little to help the economy. He did cut military pay which demoralized the troops and created an exodus of talented Officers and NCO's, but he continued to run the country on deficit spending. Who can forget stagflation - where interest rates outpaced inflation and the prime reached an unprecedented 21 percent in 1980.
Worse, with inflation running high, the Democratic Congress voted to index payments for several major entitlement programs. As the national debt grew, the annual interest payments on that debt grew as well. In four years, Carter?s total deficits totaled 227 billion dollars ? more than Johnson, Nixon, and Ford combined, and he drove the national debt close to a staggering 1 trillion dollars.