The only time a Congress acted reponsibly since 1980 was from 1994 to 2000, During those years the Congress controled spending and managed in the last year to have a balanced budget. I do not consider any budget that used the Social Security surplus to be balanced as balanced. That was a Republican Congress and I do believe that people managed just fine in those years. The bottom line is you cannot blame the Republicans for this. .
Originally Posted by Laz
That is a lie. You should know better.
http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16
Notice that while the
public debt went down in each of those four years, the
intragovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount--and, in turn, the total
national debt (which is public debt + intragovernmental holdings) went up. Therein lies the discrepancy.
When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false--as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton
did do was pay down the
public debt--notice that the claimed surplus is relatively close to the decrease in the public debt for those years. But he paid down the public debt by borrowing far
more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly Social Security).
- Update 3/31/2009: The following quote from an article at CBS confirms my explanation of the Myth of the Clinton Surplus, and the entire article essentially substantiates what I wrote.
"Over the past 25 years, the government has gotten used to the fact that Social Security is providing free money to make the rest of the deficit look smaller," said Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. 
Interestingly, this most likely was not even a conscious decision by Clinton. The Social Security Administration is legally required to take all its surpluses and buy U.S. Government securities, and the U.S. Government readily sells those securities--which automatically and immediately becomes intragovernmental holdings. The economy was doing well due to the dot-com bubble and people were earning a lot of money and paying a lot into Social Security. Since Social Security had more money coming in than it had to pay in benefits to retired persons, all that extra money was immediately used to buy U.S. Government securities. The government was still running deficits, but since there was so much money coming from excess Social Security contributions there was no need to borrow more money directly from the public. As such, the
public debt went down while intragovernmental holdings continued to skyrocket.
The net effect was that the national debt most definitely did
not get paid down because we did
not have a surplus. The government just covered its deficit by borrowing money from Social Security rather than the public.
