Posted on 02/17/2010 3:02:48 PM PST by Starman417
I'm here to blow a hole in the myth that Clinton created an amazing budget surplus that Bush squandered and turned into a huge deficit. The above chart shows the deficit/surplus since 1980, pay no attention to Obama's first year. I've talked enough about his budget deficit recently.
The following is a chart of the Nasdaq from 1990 until now:
Read more at floppingaces.net...
“I’m here to blow a hole in the myth that Clinton ...”
Some words do NOT beong in the same sentence.
What a jokey article. So the surpluses were illegitimate because they were fueled by cap gains? What a dumb argument.
It’s easy to balance the budget when you gut the military. I remember no bullets and no jeep parts.
You don’t have to analyze anything, all you have to do is look at the national debt figures which increased throughout Clinton’s years. That disproves any spin about a “surplus”
The Clinton surplus was precisely due to military reductions which were enabled by the fall of the Soviet Union! It was the “peace dividend” that Clinton squandered. Any surplus was due primarily to Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Absolutely correct. The so-called surpluses were sleight of hand, enabled by messing with Social Security funds.
It's possible the Social Security funds and military cuts might have contributed to the "surplus", but I think the real cause was that Clinton refinanced the debt (I think in 1998) with low-interest short-term loans. I remember Alan Greenspan mentioning at the time what a bad idea it was. The result was a temporary decrease in one of the largest chunks of the budget, interest on the national debt, which subsequently ballooned after the term expired. Just like the recent housing/mortgage fiasco that has caused a large part of our current economic woes.
More to the point: When morons tell us “Clinton gave us a budget surplus”, tell them they have it exactly backwards. We, the Amercan taxpayer, had more money taken from us than the Republican-controlled Congress spent. We gave Clinton the surplus, not the other way around.
See #7. There was no surplus in any of the Clinton years.
Within ten years the interest payments on the debt will eat up half of all government tax revenues. The politicians should be tarred, feathered and whipped for wasting our tax dollars and shackling us with debt.
I remember an analysis somewhere back then that showed if you took all the cuts from Clinton - the personnel, vehicles, etc. and put them together it would've made something like the 5th or 6th largest fighting force in the world. So he basically got rid of, cancelled, or delayed an entire Country's worth of military men and machines.
Rush Limbaugh blew a hole in that myth before Bush was even elected. I don’t recall the specifics but the way projected revenues are calculated was changed from its traditional methods. It was an accounting trick.
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