- Feb 12, 2007
- 59,439
- 24,092
- 2,290
The proof that this is nonsense is to simply look at the government's own national debt summary- which I provided earlier.
Over the Clinton presidency there was a 41% increase in the national debt.
The national debt summary includes accruals to the trusts, which are noncash charges and do not measure the inflows and outflows of cash into the Treasury. Those liabilities can be created, and eliminated, with a stroke of a pen.
Over Clinton's two terms, national debt rose, but the government ran surpluses in the last years of the 1990s and paid down debt. You can see all this in the budget documents, of which I linked the 2000 budget above.
She's trying to pull an apples/oranges comparison. By making people think that by some arcane measure Clinton didn't technically balance the budget, and this is the important point,
that half-truth is meant to diminish Clinton vs. Republicans like Reagan and Bush, along the lines of well, Reagan and Bush didn't have balanced budgets, but hey!
neither did Clinton!
The problem, or the deceit, is that if you apply that same arcane measure to Reagan or Bush or Bush, their debt numbers increase proportionately.
The question I asked her the last time she tried to pull this, which of course she wouldn't answer, was:
Did Clinton come closer to balancing the budget than any president in the last 30 years?
Proper accrual accounting is not arcane. Cash accounting for something as big as the federal government is what's arcane.