As conventional wisdom and headline Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data would put it, it’s been a whole generation since the United States last passed a federal budget surplus. The year was 2000, and the outgoing Clinton administration, buoyed by the peak of the dotcom bubble’s excesses and working in concert with a Republican Congress, had passed what seemed to be a $127 billion surplus — putting our nation on track to pay off the entire national debt by 2013. During the 2000 presidential campaign, both George W. Bush and Al Gore had promised to aggressively pay off the national debt, so it seemed assured that our nation’s financial future would be in good hands no matter what.
Sadly, America’s yellow-brick-road fiscal future wasn’t to be, and like the Wizard’s powers in Emerald City, the Clinton surpluses weren’t even surpluses at all: Continuing deficits were shrouded behind a smokeshow of nifty accounting that counted already received money ransacked from Social Security as income. Without this accounting fiction, the last budget surplus was achieved over 60 years ago in the final year of the Eisenhower administration.
Unfortunately, soon after the final Clinton “surplus,” the dotcom bubble burst, significantly reducing taxable income, and the September 11 terror attacks inspired a bipartisan flurry of unbridled spending and government expansion. Since then, no matter who has been in control — whether Democrats caroling for ever more welfare or Republicans screeching fiscal restraint but then shamelessly passing bulging deficits — the national debt has grown to nearly $29 trillion dollars.
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