Why did we get good results in the 90s?

Data shows welfare reform was a good thing.

Actually, Bill Clinton must be something even worse than a social Darwinist. That’s because the title of this post is wrong. Obama said that Paul Ryan’s plan (which allows spending to grow by an average of 3.1 percent per year over the next decade) is a form of “social Darwinism.” But the proposal from the […]

I’ve pointed out on several occasions that the burden of federal spending fell significantly during the Clinton years. Indeed, if we did nothing other than bring federal spending back down to 18.2 percent of GDP (where it was when Clinton left office), we’d have a budget surplus before the end of the decade (even with […]

A new video released today by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation (CF&P) demonstrates how it is possible to curtail the burden of government. Entitled,”Spending Restraint, Part I: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton,” the mini-documentary highlights the examples provided by two recent Presidents – both a Republican and a Democrat – to show that good fiscal policy is feasible.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both reduced the relative burden of government, largely because they were able to restrain the growth of domestic spending. The mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity uses data from the Historical Tables of the Budget to show how Reagan and Clinton succeeded and compares their record to the fiscal profligacy of the Bush-Obama years.

Proponents of higher taxes are fond of claiming that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase was a big success because of budget surpluses that began in 1998. That’s certainly a plausible hypothesis, and I’m already on record arguing that Clinton’s economic record was much better than Bush’s performance. But this specific assertion it is not supported […]