Good. I'm glad you think perpetual deficit is bad. I was a little worried about you there.
On the other side of the coin, a surplus should not serve as a blank check to go ahead and spend. It should be an indicator that too much revenue had been received (i.e. overtaxing) This is one of the areas where George Bush pisses me off. He appears to be just another spending monkey. Another is the lip service he gives to the 2nd ammendment (but I won't go there now).
Here is an area where we probably agree. The government should collect roughly the same amounts that it spends, no more, no less. A bit of a surplus is good, in case we need emergency spendind for some reason, or for a slight economic stimulus, but too much promotes government largesse.
However, this business of cutting taxes and funding a war at the same time is as ridiculous as if I quit my job and then went out and bought a Ferrari. He's a much worse "spending monkey" than any Democrat I can recall.
I consider the "Clinton surplus" as being a phantom because it seemed to happen overnight, just like magic, and was comprised of "moving" money from the "so called" Social Security Trust Fund to the General Fund. There is no way that you could go from deficit to surplus in the time that it allegedly happened on Clinton's watch. Our government is just not that efficient. What they are really good at is tweaking the books.
The Clinton surplus happened because he was able to defend his tax increases for the wealthy of 1993-94 from the onslaught of Newt Gingrich and the "Contract with America" GOP zombies. And the surplus wasn't just a lump sum of money that could be moved from one location to another -- it was more jobs, increased investment, the strength of the dollar, more businesses being started, and lots of other things.
