Posted on 07/21/2009 8:13:38 PM PDT by chevydude26
I am sick and tired of people saying that clinton had a surplus. I hear joe scarbough make this point everytime and Hannity today not refuting it correctly
Granted the deficit with the republican congress was at its best its been in decades in that time period with the deficit going as low as 17 billion but then shooting up to like 120 billion the next year though but clinton fudged up the numbers and took from the social security fund to make it seem like deficits were low...the debt went up every year under clinton
so the next time a lib makes this claim ...show them this link
i actually found out about recently, but bush deficit number isn’t as low as it seem too. What happens, is alot of supplementals aren’t included in the final reported deficit numbers. So you could report $100 billion deficit but with supplemental funding, it could actually be $400 billion.
The way to correctly look at this is to look at the debt level each year. Thats the true number
at any rate, anyone know how much the debt level actually increased for 1999 and 2000
yep....i agree...
we never really had a period of low taxes and low spending right?
The “Clinton” surplus was caused because the Gingrich lead House of Representatives pushed hard for spending cuts. There was quite a big fight about it at the time. It’s odd to hear people continually talk about a given president as if he runs the country all on his lonesome - as if we elect a dictator every 4 years.
Debt to GDP did fall under Clinton for exactly the reason given...the economy grew at a rapid rate.
But a large portion of that growth was the dotcom bubble, when it popped, revenue fell.
The only real cuts Clinton made was to defense spending....that worked out real well.
Clinton's "surplus" was always a bunch of crap.
Thanks for the post....I bookmarked it.
to be fair and objective, both clinton and bush’s economy sucks. They’re both bubble economies, that was built by printed money. The increase in stockmarket prices masked the reality. US dollar dropped 30%. So US lost almost 30% purchasing power during Bush’s term. So even if you were making 5% return in USD term, you were still down in real term
Back then I didn’t know whats the difference between nomiminal and real value e.g today I get paid $1000/week. Next year, I get paid $2000/week. To most ppl, you’ll think wow, I made alot of money, but money realitive to what? If your salary double, but everything else double in price, you haven’t really gained anything
Clinton was never interested in cutting the deficit (the year to year shortfall in the federal budget as opposed to the debt, which is the running cumulative shortfall in what is owed vs what is anticipated in revenue) - remember that famous montage of Clinton statements: “We could cut the deficit in two years - we might eliminate the deficit in eight years - we don’t have to worry about the deficit” etc etc - only when ‘pubs took power and forced him to bring it down did it actually shrink...and much of that was due to the cutting of defense spending under the assumption we no longer needed a big military budget -the so-called “peace dividend”...one reason Bush’s spending shot up so much was the need to restore defense cuts made by Clinton, especally after 9/11......
In 2000, it increased $17 billion.
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