Quote:I can't stand bill Clinton... but he left office with a budget surplus....


Obama brought the country back from a near depression and put the iraq war on the books, instead of a black hole like W Bush had it.


I think you may want to reevaluate your preconceptions of the last 2 democrats that were president.


It's important to at least acknowledge the facts, even if you disagree with a party's political policies or ideologies..

We're still in Iraq just as much as we were in Afghanistan after Bush said Mission Accomplised on that bloody aircraft carrier. Maybe not in the numbers, but Obama has had to send troops back there. In fact, a Navy Seal was killed over there yesterday. Neither one of them has done any favors to the national debt.

 

This is what I found regarding Clinton. He didn't do it all by himself. The economy at the time was a huge factor. 

 

The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers. Clinton’s fiscal 1994 budget also contained some spending restraints. An equally if not more powerful influence was the booming economy and huge gains in the stock markets, the so-called dot-com bubble, which brought in hundreds of millions in unanticipated tax revenue from taxes on capital gains and rising salaries.


 

Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while.


 

Quote:If you want to acknowledge facts Obama has spent more than every other president before him combined. He more than doubled the deficit. Obama is essential Bush on steroids let's not rewrite history here.

This. We are triilions of dollars in debt and though that deficit didn't begin with Obama, he has added to it exponentially. 

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