"In other words, that massive surplus simply never existed. The Clinton administration's calculations in 2000 that the government would pay off its debt and accumulate savings of $2.3 trillion over the following ten years were wrong. And they were wrong not because of any stupid error or dramatically incorrect theory about the economic world, but simply because they failed to predict that the American economy would experience a financial crisis in 2008, followed by the worst recession since the Great Depression and a historically anaemic recovery. (I assume they failed to predict the 2001 tech-crash recession as well.) The Clinton administration delivered a couple of years of real verifiable budget surpluses in the late 1990s, and continued surpluses would have shrunk the debt substantially over the decade thereafter, but the huge debt-eliminating budget surpluses they predicted were a mirage.
This isn't particularly surprising; we simply don't know how to make long-term projections about the economy or government revenues that don't have trillions of dollars worth of error margin on either side. Which is why we need to be careful about budgeting and get our tax rates and our spending more or less in balance over the long term, running surpluses in good years and deficits in bad ones. The Bush tax cuts did the opposite: $3 trillion worth of tax cuts were predicated on the premise that we were returning the people "their" money. As it turned out, the money wasn't there to return. Even without the tax cuts, the wars, or anything else, the government would have entered 2011 with $1.3 trillion in debt, not $2.3 trillion in savings. Basically, in the grip of careless enthusiasm about the economic future, we borrowed $3 trillion from bond markets and handed it out to citizens in rough proportion to how rich they already were. In the middle of a recovery. This is not a useful thing for the government to do"............READ MORE
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