"Dave Hinz" wrote in message
...

snip


No, Dave, debt as a percentage of GDP is the only meaningful way to
measure
it.

That's insane. You've either got a surplus, or you don't. Did Clinton
have a surplus in those years? Yes or no question, Ed.

Well, let's simplify this. The answer is, yes, he did.

Even the freaking Cato Institute, as anti-Clinton and anti-Social Security
as an institution can get, short of Richard Scaife's herd of farm-raised
journalists, has said so. Here's what they said in a white paper published a
few years ago:

"Over the last 40 years the non-Social
Security part of the budget was in deficit in
every year except 2-1999 and 2000. In most
years the Social Security surplus was not large
enough to compensate for the deficit in the
non-Social Security side of the budget. Thus,
of the past 40 years, the unified federal budget
was in deficit in all but 5 years: 1969 and
1998-2001."

And virtually every non-partisan economist will tell you the same thing.

You're reading the wrong column of numbers, in other words. Treasury bonds
issued to the SS trust funds do not represent a future obligation. They do
not represent debt. They are an accounting trick, a politically motivated
money-laundering scheme implemented by Congress in 1939 that gives the
illusion that there is some money there, and some actual, accrued debt. But
you should know that the federal government does not use accrual accounting.
It's all current accounts. Future obligations *within the government itself*
are strictly statutory. When one government unit issues a bond to another,
it's strictly accounting. There is no money involved, there is no debt
accrued. The money all comes from the same place: general revenues. In other
words, our taxes. It doesn't matter a whit whether there's a bond involved;
the bond has to be paid the same way the whole obligation has to be paid.
That's why Treasury bonds issued to SS are meaningless, and only show up in
the column that's a total of all outstanding Treasury securities: the first
column in that table you were looking at. As Treasury itself told you,
that's not the meaningful column, and it's for the reasons I've just
explained here.

The Treasury Dept. explains what those columns mean. You appear to prefer to
ignore them and you seem to want to make up your own definitions. That's
your business. Meanwhile, the institutions of taxation, budget-making,
private banking, world securities trading, and every other economic
institution do NOT ignore them. They know what they mean, and the people who
analyze the national debt and SS know what they mean, and they act
accordingly.

Any one of them will tell you the same thing that OMB and the Cato Institute
have said, as I've quoted here, that even without the SS surplus, the rest
of the budget was in surplus in 1999 and 2000. Counting the SS surplus, the
total, unified budget was in surplus in those years plus 1969, 1998, and
2001 (these are all fiscal years, BTW). So that's your answer.


Your checkbook isn't about debt. It's about current accounts. If you
want to
look at current accounts, look at current surpluses or deficits, not at
accumulated debt. Debt shows up in your statement of net assets, not in
your
checkbook.

Bloody. ****ing. Hell. It's word-games with you, Ed, just like Clinton.
I'll try it again:

Word games? You mean, I care about what words MEAN, and you don't?


If, in any given month, I spend more than I earn, I have not produced
a financial surplus during that month.

And, as Cato, Treasury, OMB, and every other source that knows what it's
talking about says, there was a financial surplus in those years I listed
above. Current-accounts surplus, and a decline in the national debt. Net,
actual, real-money surplus.

Where's the problem? Do you need a further explanation?

I'll be glad to try. You may get it better if we actually follow the money,
from SS revenues to where it's actually spent. Those are the terms on which
the surplus is based.

--
Ed Huntress