[Lord_Calvinus]

Spending and balancing the budget are two different, even if related, things. You can increase spending and balance a budget. And, you have already admitted that the budget did balance during Clinton’s admin. Where has it gone with Bush?

Say what you want, but, suprisingly, Clinton did consistently push for balanced spending, even if we don’t agree with how it was spent or how he got there. Bush, OTOH, has been horribly irresponsible. Instead of ACTING like a fiscal conservative, he has acted like a liberal, doing nothing to curb either the size of government or its out of control spending.

[Just mythoughts]

You forget that the Clintons had a ‘conservative Congress’ which kept their spending in check. President Bush had a ‘war’ to fight and thus turned over to domestic compassionate liberalism to keep that military funded. In spite of the vast spread of USA liberalism under President Bush he could NOT buy the love of liberals.

[HawaiianGecko]

Throwing numbers around doesn't make sense with out context.  As you can see our debt to gross domestic product hovers in the low to mid 60% range over time. It is also noticeable that 2000-2002 were significantly lower, indicating the results of the former dot-com boom and the effects of 9/11.  But the real thing to notice is that Bush's highest ratio is 65% and it only occurred one time while Clinton, my, my, my, had 66-68% for six of his eight years in office. 

Links to government sites where I got this information:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/mspd/mspd.htm

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp#Mid

 

 

[rurgan]

You are wrong. Clinton did nothing to reduce federal spending. In fact spending increased at least by 50% or 1/2 a trillion dollars during Clinton’s term.

The reason the budget balanced for only 2 of clinton’s 8 years was a FLUKE. The dot com bubble created a huge economy that wasn’t really real. all these temporary businesses did pay taxes with increased revenues to the government. In addition oil was $10 per barrel and gasoline was under a dollar during that time which helped the economy which further increased revenues to the government . this is why it balanced. Clinton didn’t have any thing to do with the low oil or the dot com bubble or the internet growth.

Federal spending increases during the Clinton 1990’s in million of dollars:

1990 1,253,130
1995 1,515,884
2000 1,789,216

So you see from these figures that Clinton increased spending almost by one half a trillion dollars.

proof:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104753.html