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Clinton inherited huge defecates from the Reagan/Bush administration. In fact the largest since WWll. He managed to turn them in the largest budget surpluses EVER !
Uh, no actually he didn't have a surplus because of the budgetary trickery that started with LBJ when trust funds were counted in the budget.
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In early 1968 President Lyndon Johnson made a change in the budget presentation by including Social Security and all other trust funds in a"unified budget." This is likewise sometimes described by saying that Social Security was placed "on-budget."
This 1968 change grew out of the recommendations of a presidential commission appointed by President Johnson in 1967, and known as the President's Commission on Budget Concepts. The concern of this Commission was not specifically with the Social Security Trust Funds, but rather it was an effort to rationalize what the Commission viewed as a confusing budget presentation. At that time, the federal budget consisted of three separate and inconsistent sets of measures, and often budget debates became bogged-down in arguments over which of the three to use. As an illustration of the problem, the projected fiscal 1968 budget was either in deficit by $2.1 billion, $4.3 billion, or $8.1 billion, depending upon which measure one chose to use. Consequently, the Commission's central recommendation was for a single, unified, measure of the federal budget--a measure in which every function and activity of government was added together to assess the government's fiscal position.
http://www.ssa.gov/history/BudgetTreatment.html To know if a president actually produced a balanced budget or not, look at the national debt:
Date Dollar Amount
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
09/30/1998 5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997 5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996 5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995 4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994 4,692,749,910,013.32
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139.38
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/.../histdebt_histo4.htmOne can say that in Clinton's time that the process slowed down, but the national debt was still increasing. The reason probably was due to the 1994 midterm election that stymied both parties from spending on their parties own priorities.