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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (532727)	11/25/2009 4:41:08 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574616

The primary source is always income minus outlays. But one can reasonably consider the primary budget separately from the social security trust fund. I mostly don't, I think the trust fund is more of a fiction than a useful reality, but if you think its real, borrowing from it is borrowing just the same, and even if you don't we accumulated future liabilities (assuming we aren't going to cancel or really slash the entitlement programs) during the Clinton administration, faster than we paid down the debt to the public. In a more technical sense I agree with you, we did have a surplus. Accumulating a future non-debt liability isn't adding debt, and in most senses it isn't spending the money yet, so income did exceed out go. But the net future liability situation is very meaningful, and just considering income and direct immediate outgo, without considering the accumulated liabilities gives a distorted picture, and allows you to game the situation to distort the picture even more.