Broder Bombs Big Time On The Budget

David Broder of the WaPo communicated the following yesterday (in a column about outgoing comptroller general David Walker; he was the head of the GAO who frequently warned our federal government to get its fiscal act together under Bushco)…

The last time the broad public grasped the danger of budget deficits was in 1992, when Ross Perot paid for half-hour television infomercials, complete with dramatic charts and graphs, as part of his presidential campaign. That seeded the ground for Bill Clinton's 1993 effort that succeeded briefly in wiping out those deficits.

I honestly don’t know what that means (the effort to balance the budget did begin in '93, though), but this tells you that Clinton, after tax increases and cuts in services, delivered a balanced budget in February 1998, with projected savings to go into Social Security (sounds like ancient history now, which it is, sadly).

(Also, some have questioned the accounting used by the Clinton administration to arrive at their totals, but I think this provides additional clarification that tells us that the numbers are still sound.)

I don’t know what role Ross Perot supposedly played in this (though his “giant sucking sound” remark turned out to be prescient, unfortunately), and it took five years for Clinton and his people to straighten things out, but they got it done.