KT,
I know we discussed some of this in the past, but if we leave out the politics and bias we won't have to do it again. (I desperately don't want to either because it's so obvious I am right about what happened under Clinton)
We didn't even come close to paying the bill under Clinton and won't under the next administration either no matter who gets elected.
To begin with, Clinton ran a surplus for awhile, but that was partly because his timing was perfect and partly because we had a stock market bubble during much of his 2 terms.
The economy was just coming out of the Bush 1 recession when he took over. It then proceeded to boom in subsequent years as it almost always does after excesses are removed. So on a longer term normalized basis (which would include both the exceptional revenue times that resulted from the bubble and the bad times that followed during the bust that occurred just as he was leaving) I doubt we were actually ever running break given his policies. We were just a lot closer than before him and since. In addition, that was a peak time in terms of demographic revenue benefits vs. where we are heading now where the demographics are starting to work against us. So he had some unusual temporary tailwinds helping his budget performance.
Plus, we know the accounting was BS then and it's still BS now.
They were and still are using the TEMPORARY SS surplus to make up for operating deficits. The national debt was actually not being reduced much if at all under Clinton. It was just the public debt was being reduced sharply. Even worse, the present value of the other unfunded promises that are being accrued for health care (mostly medicare) etc... were monstrous then too.
On "reality based accounting" the Clinton years ran up horrible and massive IOUs for unfunded promises of various types etc... just not nearly as bad as under Bush.
In addition, it's not the next few years that matter. We can manage to make ends meet with some tweaking. It's the next 100 years where the promises made by government expansionists over the last few decades come due that matter. Those are enormous.
None of it was Clinton's fault of course. It was the fault of the morons that made the promises they could not quantify and hoped to pay for with revenues they couldn't quantify either.
This last point is exactly why I think it's preposterous to think it's a good idea to expand government power. There is absolutely no evidence that expansionists will do anything other than expand those IOUs, tax us into socialist oblivion, or inflate to pay for them. In fact, I don't think it's preposterous. There are no adjectives in the English language that sufficiently describe how stupid I think you have to be to want to transfer more power to government. I feel so strongly about that, there aren't any adjectives that can properly describe how obvious I think that is. |
