The Clinton Surplus Myth - Part 2

There is a lot to understand when this subject comes up but the basic question to ask is, if the national debt did not go down, how could there have been a surplus. The answer, of course, is there wasn't one. The government borrowing from trust funds run by the government to run the government is like taking from your kid's college fund to pay the bills. If you're more honest than the government, you will someday repay that money to the college fund. The government says it means to, but hey, next month we need to dip into those trust funds again, and again and again month after month after month. Looks good on paper and fools Liberals into opening their mouths and spewing nonsense, but it doesn't stop them from trying.

Need more nitty gritty details than you can ever use? Try this:

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/craigsteiner/2011/08/23/the_clinton_surplus_myth-_part_2/page/full/

Here's a good section of that article:

"There Was No Surplus

There is no two ways about it: A real surplus would cause the total national debt to go down.

Had the trust funds contributed $248.7 billion in excess funds and the government had reduced the public debt by $250 billion, that would mean it used all of the trust funds' excess funds to reduce the public debt and also used a real $1.3 billion federal surplus to reduce the public debt. That would've reduced the national debt by $1.3 billion and been a real surplus.

But if intragovernmental debt goes up faster than the public debt goes down (as it did in 2000), it means the government is simply borrowing and spending money from trust funds and will have to pay it back later. That's not a surplus, it's just borrowing money from trust funds instead of the public. The money was still borrowed to make up a deficit in the government's general fund.

The bottom line is that there was never a real surplus. As I said in my original article, Clinton's best year still represented a $17.9 billion deficit. Only by using misunderstood government accounting that doesn't clearly disclose trust fund income can one presume to claim there was a surplus."