I'm a bit disappointed that Dr. Sowell doesn't know that the budget hasn't been balanced (no increase in the national debt over the course of a fiscal year) since the Eisenhower administration.
. . . Gingrich engineered the first Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 40 years — followed by the first balanced budget in 40 years. . . .
The federal budget was balanced in '98, '99, '00 and '01.
1998 minus 40 is 1958; (the Eisenhower administration)
I distinctly remember reading columns by Sowell about the insanity of declaring some things "off-budget" as the US has been doing for a long time. Why, for example, should disaster relief be off-budget? There should be a disaster relief contingency line in each year's budget, factored in magnitude by the historical scale and probability of sh!t happening. Some years you're up, some years you're down, washes out over the years. GAAP requires companies to account for that, but the Govt can pretend not only that it won't ever happen, it can pretend that when it happens it doesn't actually happen.
But if you define the budget to be the sum of everything that is not legislated to be traditionally off-budget, the Gingrich Congress caused it to be balanced without pushing more stuff off-budget. While there are those painful asterisks, it was quite an uphill achievement, built mostly on Gingrich's spinal rigidity at that time.