I don’t rember anyone other than President Clinton getting credit. The storyline when Bush was elected was that Clinton left him a surplus. But Speaker Gingrich has been taking credit due to the commitment he and his Congress had to passing a balanced budget amendment which forced Clinton to react.
I’ve found one article that said it was President Reagan. His handling of the Cold War caused the Soviet Union collapse and generated a peace dividend when military spending was cutback.
None of the above, or all of the above. Whatever floats your boat. Reagan built up the deficit, but he did create the conditions under which it could be shrunk. Clinton was Presidentwho signed Gingrich’s budget (the latter being the most important official directly involved in the budget).
However, the surplus was also temporary and not really a surplus. That is, it occurred during a booming economy which didn’t and couldn’t last, both because it couldn’t grow at that rate forever and because government ramped up other spending. Second, it was also susbstantially an artifact of twisted government accounting, a Black Art which seems to involve policy statements, friendly bargains, and living sacrifices of economists to the Dark Powers (otherwise known as lies, damn lies, and statistics).
The answer is all of the above. With the Cold War won there was a massive peace dividend and taxes had just been raised by Bush which helped cost him the election. When Clinton was elected he tried to pass HillaryCare but botched that, which helped get the GOP to take over congress for the first time in a generation. Perot had focused alot of voters on the issue of deficits so in order to appeal to these people Gingrich announced a plan to balance the budget in eight years. Clinton thought that balancing the budget so quickly would hurt the economy and he came out with a plan to balance the budget in twelve years. They essentially squabbled over how to balance the budget for the next four years. Meanwhile the internet bubble expanded and huge amounts of money poured into the stock market causing tax collections to go up tremendously. The GOP congress and Clinton could not come up with a mutually satisfying way to spend all the new money rolling in and so the budget was balanced.
Reagan did not end the Cold War. He extended it. He also raised taxes, and did not significantly improve the economy. His favorite anecdote was about how good a liar he was.
Is Gingrich now taking credit for the 1993 tax increases that helped balance the budget? I’m sure he’s still claiming that the mostly non-existent Medicare cuts which Gingrich shut down the government over were also a big component of balancing the budget. Which they were not.
The balanced budgets of the late 1990’s were probably about 30% due to higher tax rates, 5% due to “decreased” spending, and the rest due to the fabulous economy.
No, I’m pretty sure it was Carter who deserves all the credit. His boycott of the 1980 Olympics was the moral censure that caused the Soviet system to collapse, ended the Cold War, and thereby balanced the budget.
Hey, if you want to credit indirect causes it’s as good a theory as anything else.
The Congressional Republicans at that time ran on the promise of implementing the Contract with America.
Although the balanced budget amendment failed, the Republicans were still determined to balance the budget.
Clinton also wanted a balanced budget but apparently by different means than the republicans, so they all had to cooperate and do some compromising. But in the end, for brief period, we did have a balanced budget.
So it seems that the credit can be split between Clinton and the Republican Congress.
Clinton’s first act (when his party controlled Congress and the White House) was to increase the deficit (cite), not decrease it. And the budget Clinton submitted to Congress had $200 billion in deficit “as far as the eye could see”. Clinton’s target for 1998, IOW, was a deficit of $198 billion, and he failed. Gingrich’s goal was to balance the budget. He failed, too - the budget was in surplus.
She designed the new computer system using Oracle under Clinton to help control excessive allocations during year end close out. One budget later, it balanced. Don’t know what happened after that.
The rise of the Internet balanced the budget. In 1995, Gingrich proposed a balanced budget by 2002. Clinton proposed a balanced budget by 2005. They “agreed” on 2002 with the same accounting tricks that happened in the last budget deal that never materialized.
The budget was balanced in 1997 because of the temporary boom in Internet companies. It fell out of balance in 2001 (not G.W. still Clinton policies, although the later ballooning of the deficit was his fault for many reasons) because everyone stopped worrying about deficits and the Internet bubble collapsed.
So, while Newt and Clinton get some minor credit for at least talking about it, nobody made it happen. It was a blip on the national budget radar.
In 2001, there was a surplus of $128.236 billion, even with cost of the Bush tax cuts coming into effectm which was $70 billion in that year alone. In 2002, there was a deficit of $157.758 billion. That’s clearly on Bush’s watch.
But on the larger point, I agree with you: the surpluses were mostly because of the booming economy.
Heh – I thought huge tax cuts were supposed to produce booming economies. Yet another instance of 9/11 changing everything, right?
