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Every single day, some left winger on this forum spouts off about the surplus left when Clinton left office. This is especially the case in recent times with our spiraling deficit.
Nearly every single time I see some lefty going on about how they were able to balance the budget under clinton and provide a surplus which would have paid off the deficit, I correct them. And every day they keep providing non-sense claims about the same situation to back their agenda.
So, here is a thread regarding the fallacy of a surplus. Can we please stop continuing the lie here.
"It is the third year in a row the federal government has taken in more than it spent, and has paid down the debt. The last time the U.S. government had a third consecutive year of national debt reduction was 1949, said the official.
The federal budget surplus for fiscal year 1999 was $122.7 billion, and $69.2 billion for fiscal year 1998. Those back-to-back surpluses, the first since 1957, allowed the Treasury to pay down $138 billion in national debt."
"In fact, from 1998 to 2001, the federal government ran total annual budget surpluses of between $69.2 billion and $236.2 billion, according to figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO)."
And why not just one more, or would you like me to continue?
From 1998 article:
''Everyone was projecting deficits for the rest of our lives,'' Mr. Gingrich said.
The deficit has dropped to $22.6 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 from a high of $290 billion in 1992. The Congressional Budget Office's surplus projections remain lower than that of many private sector economists who say the surplus could reach as high as $50 billion this year.
Every single day, some left winger on this forum spouts off about the surplus left when Clinton left office. This is especially the case in recent times with our spiraling deficit.
Nearly every single time I see some lefty going on about how they were able to balance the budget under clinton and provide a surplus which would have paid off the deficit, I correct them. And every day they keep providing non-sense claims about the same situation to back their agenda.
So, here is a thread regarding the fallacy of a surplus. Can we please stop continuing the lie here.
Hard to stop telling the truth. Here are the surplus/deficit data from the CBO.
I've bolded the ones where there is a budget surplus. Here is the source: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc...icaltables.pdf
1990 -221.0
1991 -269.2
1992 -290.3
1993 -255.1
1994 -203.2
1995 -164.0
1996 -107.4
1997 -21.9 1998 69.3
1999 125.6
budget surplus is what we are talking about and always have been.
you are confusing yourself .
You do understand, don't you, that all that really matters is at the end of one's presidency, did the debt INCREASE or DECREASE? CLINTON INCREASED THE NATIONAL DEBT!
Would you praise a president if they had a budget surplus of $100 billion, only to go $1 trillion in debt? Is that just an issue of not failing as badly as other presidents at fiscal mismanagement?
Also, given that there was a republican senate and congress for these wonderful "surpluses", could you tell me exactly which Clinton policies HE INITIATED, reduced expenditures? I will give you the welfare reform issue- I think everyone would agree that was a positive. Given our current democratic senate and congress blowing through money like there is no tommorrow through both the Bush and Obama presidency, do you think that the republican senate and congress had anything to do with Clinton's small two year surplus, or was it just all him making the legislation, passing it through both houses single handedly, and signing it?
You do understand, don't you, that all that really matters is at the end of one's presidency, did the debt INCREASE or DECREASE? CLINTON INCREASED THE NATIONAL DEBT!
The thread is about budget surplus. Can you please stick to it, instead of your typical diversionary tactics?
PS. National Debt did go down in the years there were budget surplus. Do the math.
lets try this again, since its apparent that nobody even read the link provided and rather just continued to provide sources which support the myth:
"Understanding what happened requires understanding two concepts of what makes up the national debt. The national debt is made up of public debt and intragovernmental holdings. The public debt is debt held by the public, normally including things such as treasury bills, savings bonds, and other instruments the public can purchase from the government. Intragovernmental holdings, on the other hand, is when the government borrows money from itself--mostly borrowing money from social security.
When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false--as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton did do was pay down the public debt--notice that the claimed surplus is relatively close to the decrease in the public debt for those years. But he paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly Social Security)."
It is like saying that I reduced my overall debt by paying down my credit card AFTER I get a loan from the bank.
Sorry, that isn't a debt reduction.
More smoke and mirrors from Washington, and people that buy right into it.
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