Deficits as far as the eye can see....

What do you think of President Clinton's economic policies? Like those disappearing deficits? Want to give him full credit?

Well, recently, I found a couple of contemporary articles that might refresh your memory.

Remember Clinton's first economic proposal? It was more spending. $16 billion of new spending. And his tax increase? Lots more spending came at the same time. Spending reductions? Rejected. And what spending ended up getting cut in the end? Military spending.

And what did contemporaries think? From the CBO:

In July 1996 the CBO announces that the Clinton deficit-reduction honeymoon is over. After 1997, the Clinton baseline outlook steadily deteriorates in every year for the next decade. Then the government's finances implode. Runaway entitlement expenditures -- particularly for Medicare and Medicaid -- ravage the budget. The CBO predicts that unless transfer payments are curtailed the nation faces a future of "unsustainably high levels of federal borrowing," with the national debt ascending relentlessly from 60 per cent of national output today, to 150 per cent by 2025.

Either the CBO is incompetent, or the falling deficits were unexpected.

On the subject of taxes, did tax cuts (two under Reagan) drop tax
revenue? Did tax increases (two under Bush and Clinton) increase
revenue?

The Left is now again busy trying to rewrite history to suggest that the Bush 1990 and the Clinton 1993 tax hikes contributed mightily to the decline in the deficit. The top marginal income-tax rate has risen by 50 per cent -- from 28 per cent in 1989 to 42 per cent this year. Yet federal revenues grew faster in the 1980s with Reagan's substantial across-the-board tax cut than during the 1990s with these two giant tax hikes.

Overall real federal revenues (1982 to 1989) grew by 24 per cent during the seven-year period after the Reagan tax cuts took full effect. But (as currently forecast by the Congressional Budget Office) overall federal revenue growth from 1990 through 1997 will be only 18.5 per cent. If federal revenues had grown in the 1990s at only the pace they did after the Reagan tax cuts, federal receipts in 1996 would be almost $50 billion greater and the deficit would be one-third smaller.

Income-tax receipts after adjusting for inflation rose by 16.3 per cent in the seven years after the full Reagan tax cut. Income-tax receipts will have climbed by 16.1 per cent in real terms in the seven years since 1990.

And here's another article, talking about how wrong liberal Keynesian economists were in the 70's. It's an impressive list, almost like Beta, Milli Vanilli, and Boo.com put together.

You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts.