{"id":6148,"date":"2005-12-21T14:29:45","date_gmt":"2005-12-21T19:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6148"},"modified":"2005-12-21T14:29:45","modified_gmt":"2005-12-21T19:29:45","slug":"shoveling-some-snow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/shoveling-some-snow\/","title":{"rendered":"Shoveling some Snow"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can appreciate the awkwardness the administration must feel when it comes to their enormous, record-breaking budget deficits. The president ran in 2000 on a platform that not only called for a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution, but insisted that deficits were “dangerous” for the economy. Once in office, inheriting the largest-ever surplus from his predecessor, Bush vowed to pay down “an unprecedented amount of our national debt<\/a>.” That was then. As the nation now knows, of course, the president is easily the most fiscally irresponsible person to ever occupy the Oval Office.<\/p>\n

So, yes, I can understand a certain sense of embarrassment, but there’s just no reason for administration officials to humiliate themselves by spouting transparent nonsense<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 with a federal budget surplus of $127 billion. President George Bush ran a deficit of $319 billion in 2005. So who deserves more credit for fighting red ink?<\/p>\n

No question, says Treasury Secretary John Snow: It’s his boss, Bush. Sipping a latte at a Starbucks coffee shop with reporters in Washington two days ago, he said that “the president’s legacy will be one of having significantly reduced the deficit in his time,” and said Clinton’s budget was a “mirage” and “wasn’t a real surplus.”<\/p>\n

Snow said the Clinton surplus was inflated by a stock-price bubble and that Bush will be remembered for cutting the gap from a record $412 billion in the 2004 fiscal year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I couldn’t make this up if I tried. According to the Treasury Secretary, the president with the best record in American history on improving the nation’s finances deserves no credit, while the president with the worst record in history deserves praise. It’s like I’m stuck in a Twilight Zone episode. As the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann said, “Snow’s comment would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetically and obviously inaccurate.”<\/p>\n

If I understand Snow’s “bubble” argument, the idea is that stock market growth in the late 1990s helped fill the Treasury by way of capital gains taxes. So, when the budget was over $100 billion in the black, it wasn’t a figure that could be expected to last, especially if capital gains rates were going to be reduced significantly. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but if Clinton’s surplus “wasn’t a real surplus,” why did the Bush administration cut taxes by $2 trillion based on the forecasted surpluses that they assumed would continue?<\/p>\n

As for Snow’s point that Bush’s deficits will be “the president’s legacy,” on this, I completely agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can appreciate the awkwardness the administration must feel when it comes to their enormous, record-breaking budget deficits. The president ran in 2000 on a platform that not only called for a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution, but insisted that deficits were “dangerous” for the economy. Once in office, inheriting the largest-ever surplus from his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}