Re:Whereas PRESIDENT Obama... (Score 1)

Oh, and by the way, there never was a Clinton-era budget surplus; Politicians in both parties (Democrats AND "establishment" Republicans) love to pretend they have been fiscally responsible by simply leaving things "off the books". The so-Called Clinton surplus numbers were only projections and only valid if you pretended some of the biggest items on the books (Social Security and Medicare) had no future obligation (and therefore no need to actually save/invest the money coming into the programs, freeing that money up for current spending). Corporate executives who do their accounting this way (not including wall st bankers with Washington lobbyists) go to jail.

Do you have a source for this information? : This source seems to say otherwise. To take the important parts from the linked article:

Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased?
A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not.

and the part that you seem to be hinting at:

Other readers have noted a USA Today story stating that, under an alternative type of accounting, the final four years of the Clinton administration taken together would have shown a deficit. This is based on an annual document called the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," which reports what the governments books would look like if kept on an accrual basis like those of most corporations, rather than the cash basis that the government has always used. The principal difference is that under accrual accounting the government would book immediately the costs of promises made to pay future benefits to government workers and Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. But even under accrual accounting, the annual reports showed surpluses of $69.2 billion in fiscal 1998, $76.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and $46 billion for fiscal year 2000. So even if the government had been using that form of accounting the deficit would have been erased for those three years.