[srmanuel]

Then you must be less than 30 years old, the budget was balanced under Bill Clinton, he was POTUS from 1992 to 2000.

Since then both parties have destroyed the budget and put it into a multi-trillion dollar structural deficit.

[Alberta's Child]

There may have been one year where we allegedly had a Federal budget "surplus" around 1999-2000. I only remember this because I was at a professional event around that time where my Republican Congressman criticized our state government for employing accounting gimmicks to hide the true cost of major infrastructure spending. He then proudly crowed about how effective he and his associates had been in forcing fiscal responsibility in Washington, to the point where we had a "surplus" for the first time in decades.

After the event was over I had a chance to meet the guy, and I diplomatically told him he was full of sh!t ... because the "surplus" only existing as a result of the biggest accounting gimmick of all: using excess FICA (Social Security) tax revenues to offset revenue shortfalls in the Federal budget. In his own pathetic, simpering way he admitted that I knew what I was talking about.