Rys is cool though. He gives out of office hours support for people learning 3d graphics.
Check out his recent talk at the London Graphics Hackerspace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWzcEKHbBv4
Check out his recent talk at the London Graphics Hackerspace: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWzcEKHbBv4
Bill Clinton left us with a surplus. He also cheated on his wife. Still a good president but cheating is a dick move. See what I'm saying (please don't read into it and focus on the wrong thing now)?
I do agree with the point you were making.
Throw in Bush-era tax cuts and two wars, and you can say bye-bye to that.
Edit: I did a little research and I was astonished to find out that welfare programs cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually. I didn't think that something like welfare would make up a significant percentage of the budget. It's over 10% of the federal budget if you include all of the programs that fall under "welfare."
Looking at the statistics, the amount of money spent on welfare didn't significantly increase or decrease during or after Bill Clinton was in office (until our current financial crisis.) I know that he was trying to find smarter ways to spend the money, such as by getting people back to work with education and employment assistance, but how could the reform have added to the surplus if the amount of spending wasn't reduced?
After looking at this site a bit longer, it looks like every category of spending increased each year he was in office. Even though spending increased, there were some areas where he slowed down the rate of increase, which is admirable. But if we increased spending in every area before, during and after his presidency, yet we produced a surplus during his presidency, doesn't that mean the surplus was created by the thriving economy, which was in turn thriving because of the internet boom? I'm not asking to be argumentative, I just don't understand how we can say that our reduced need for defense spending combined with welfare reform caused a surplus when we didn't reduce our spending in either category from 1993-2001.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1994USbt_13bs5...
Edit2: Since I asked a couple of questions. Wouldn't it be more productive to answer them instead of downvoting me? I wouldn't have asked them if I didn't genuinely want someone to explain things to me from their perspective. Why let someone continue to be wrong when given the opportunity to correct it?