Quote from sfbayarea:
No the surplus was not an accounting fraud. Some other GOPer tried to say the same thing. I disproved it in theory. It had to do with debt that incurred from interest owned to social security by government programs. In reality it's nothing, the treasury borrowed from social security funds and says it owes interest and is added to the debt. In reality, it's like you telling yourself that you borrowing money from one fund to pay for another and all the while you say you owe yourself interest. Which is really nothing, because interest that we owe ourselves is meaningless and can easily be wiped clean. Funny, how I explained it to him and he shut up ranting about it real quick. I love it when GOPs get stumped and sit out all quiet. Doesn't surprise me if they still try to weasel, lie, distort, and mislead they way back into the discussion because that's all they can do.
Back then the Dems works with GOPs to get things done. That's not the case now thanks to Murdoch television. Let's not forget Gingrich's issues himself. If Gingrich ever became president, it'd be like President Caligula reincarnated.
1. Lets see who really balance the budget...
Newt Gingrich and company -- for all their faults -- have received virtually no credit for balancing the budget. Yet today's surplus is, in part, a byproduct of the GOP's single-minded crusade to end 30 years of red ink. Arguably, Gingrich's finest hour as Speaker came in March 1995 when he rallied the entire Republican House caucus behind the idea of eliminating the deficit within seven years.
We have a balanced budget today that is mostly a result of 1) an exceptionally strong economy that is creating gobs of new tax revenues and 2) a shrinking military budget. Social spending is still soaring and now costs more than $1 trillion.
Skeptics said it could not be done in seven years. The GOP did it in four.
Now let us contrast this with the Clinton fiscal record. Recall that it was the Clinton White House that fought Republicans every inch of the way in balancing the budget in 1995. When Republicans proposed their own balanced-budget plan, the White House waged a shameless Mediscare campaign to torpedo the plan -- a campaign that the Washington Post slammed as "pure demagoguery." It was Bill Clinton who, during the big budget fight in 1995, had to submit not one, not two, but five budgets until he begrudgingly matched the GOP's balanced-budget plan. In fact, during the height of the budget wars in the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration admitted that "balancing the budget is not one of our top priorities."
And lest we forget, it was Bill Clinton and his wife who tried to engineer a federal takeover of the health care system -- a plan that would have sent the government's finances into the stratosphere. Tom Delay was right: for Clinton to take credit for the balanced budget is like Chicago Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel taking credit for delivering the pitch to Mark McGuire that he hit out of the park for his 62nd home run.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/no-bill-clinton-didnt-balance-budget
2. Lets convert leftist doublespeak to English...
"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. "
http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16
3. Regarding the leftist cooperation.
Harry Reid democrat may not allow the dems to produce a budget for four straight years. You blame that on Murdoch?
.