"Gunner Asch" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 04:33:49 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

Regarding your sleight of hand about the paydown of the national debt
during
Clinton's administration: From what I can tell, you're saying that the
year-over-year debt reductions weren't real, because the 5- and 15-year
projections were wrong. Is that about it, or did I lose track of the pea
while you were shuffling the shells around?

--
Ed Huntress


Clintons "balanced budget" was the result of "projected revenues" that
if they had actually materialized..would have balanced the budget in 5
yrs.

Somebody has been giving you a Snow job. Bloomberg.com, one of the most
trusted sources of financial news and data, had this to say about it:

==========================================
Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- 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?

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.''

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.

``Snow's comment would be laughable if it weren't so pathetically and
obviously inaccurate,'' said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the
Brookings Institution, a policy research group in Washington. Colleague
William Gale, who worked on the Council of Economic Advisers under President
George H.W. Bush, said calling members of the current administration
``deficit-fighters is completely at odds with all of their policies.''

Snow has some support for his view. ``Capital gains receipts were unusually
high'' during the last years of the Clinton administration, said Ed
McKelvey, senior U.S. economist at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. He
estimated that when the budget surplus reached a peak of $237 billion in
2000, capital gains tax payments were about $90 billion higher than the norm
for the early-to-mid 1990s.

=========================================

In other words, Clinton's budget surplus was real, Bush's deficit is real,
and Snow-job has been reduced to coming up with explanations for why Clinton
ran a budget surplus while Bush has run a deficit.

Wherever you're getting your financial analysis, Gunner, it's time for a
change.

However..those revenues DID NOT materialize, we were sliding into a
recession, we had the DotCom bubble implosion (thankyouforbothBubba)
and revenues started drying up.

So there was NO balanced budget. That was like me saying Ive paid
off all my bills because next year I hope to have made enough money to
do so.

Gunner

Bull****. That was all in current accounts. I think we went over this
before, a few years ago.

--
Ed Huntress