Popular belief holds that the budget surpluses were do to a decease in spending during the Clinton Administration. This is only true if you are talking about defense spending.
Investor's Business Daily:

Newly released data from the Congressional Budget Office show that, as in other areas of his life, Clinton didn't exercise tremendous self-control when it came to domestic spending — contrary to the image now put forward that the 1990s was an era of unprecedented fiscal rectitude.
It's true that government spending in the 1990s increased on average only about 3% a year, which was well below GDP.

But this can be accounted for by the post-Cold War reduction in defense and the savings in interest associated with it. Defense expenditure dropped from 5.6% of GDP in 1989 to only 3% a decade later, while interest came down from 3.1% in 1989 to 2.5% in 1999.

Spending as a proportion of GDP in all other areas over the same period increased from 12.5% to 13.2%.

So it was defense reductions that account for the fact that spending overall dropped from more than 21% of GDP on the eve of the 1990s to well under 19% at the end of the decade.

With this kind of defense cuts seeming unlikely or impossible in the post 9-11 world, the government must manage unnecessary spending even more closely, something neither the Bush Administration or Congress has done (Does Bush even own a "veto pen"?).

Democrats who hail Clinton as a budget hawk are sorely wrong. The only anti-spending voice came from the then-rabid Republican Congress led by Newt Gingrich, which seems to have mellowed in its decade of majority power.

All in all, federal spending is growing at a rate of about 7% a year, and entitlements remain a perennial problem. Social Security payments are growing at 5% a year, and reform of the system seems stalled politically.

Medicare will grow 12% from 2005 to 2006, and Bush seems committed to following through on expanding Medicare with a pricey prescription drug benefit scheduled to take effect in the new year.

Meanwhile, Medicaid spending has gone up by nearly 50% since the year 2000.

There is no other way to reduce the deficit, which has gone worrysomely high except by cutting entitlements. Tax-happy Democrats will want to raise taxes, but lower taxes increases tax revenue because it stimulates more output. Raising taxes will increase tax revenue for two to three years, but once those are adjusted for, productivity will decrease, and the government will lose tax revenue and future tax revenue were the Bush tax cuts to remain in place.

Posted by Ryan S. on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 2:55 PM | Permalink |