“Budget was never balanced. Debt went up every year”
Your facts are wrong...Gingrich presided over the only balanced budgets in a long time...persuading Clinton to come along, a political fete rare in occurrence.
In 1996 the budget deficit was significantly reduced from previous years. The next year, the deficit was again lowered significantly. The budgets for 1998 and 1999 spent less money than they took in, allowing a portion of the national debt to be paid off.
At the cost of a weak defense that ended up biting us in the new millennium. If you recall, the military budget was slashed heavily and there were massive revenues coming in through the dot com bubble that were unrealistic by even the most liberal business model.
To discount the revisionist history going on here, let's look back at a Steve Moore article from the time period to see what was actually going on.
Now for the bad news for GOP partisans. The federal budget has not been balanced by any Republican spending reductions. Uncle Sam now spends $150 billion more than in 1995. Over the past 10 years, the defense budget, adjusted for inflation, has been cut $100 billion, but domestic spending has risen by $300 billion. We have a balanced budget today that is mostly a result of 1) an exceptionally strong economy that is creating gobs of new tax revenues and 2) a shrinking military budget. Social spending is still soaring and now costs more than $1 trillion. Is this the kind of balanced budget that fiscal conservatives want? A budget with no deficit, but that funds the biggest government ever?
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5656
I don't recall any Conservative happy back then because of this "Balenced Budget" because it was a fraud. We all ended up paying for this house of cards in the 2000's.
“Budget was never balanced. Debt went up every year”
Your facts are wrong...Gingrich presided over the only balanced budgets in a long time...persuading Clinton to come along, a political fete rare in occurrence.”
The national debt has gone up every year since 1957. However, the “surplus” Social Security taxes collected during that time period actually contributed to the National Debt, because they are “invested” in special issue Treasuries.
Newt did balance the budget, so that the spending did not exceed the incoming funds from all sources. Clinton then took credit and claimed that he had turned a deficit into a surplus.
LSM pointed out about once that the “surplus” was actually the excess Social Security. Then, realtiy was ignored as both parties argued about how to spend the non - existent surplus.
I agree with you that it was quite a feat to balance the budget, even though it did not bring down the National Debt.
“Gingrich presided over the only balanced budgets in a long time...persuading Clinton to come along, a political fete rare in occurrence.
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Unfortunately, Newt chose to raid the projected $1.5 trillion dollar surplus in the Social Security Funds in 1998 to pay for tax cuts and balance the budget.
http://www.ctj.org/images/gingpr.pdf