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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

Eliminate candidates who promise to lower taxes (slows down debt repayment substantially) and those who promise new or expanded services. Who's left? "I'll tax you a little more and not spend that money" is a tough pitch, even if it would be helpful for the debt.

I think Clinton was the last us president to balance the budget and start reducing the deficit so I guess see what he did.

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See what Clinton did? Well, he said he'd create a plan to balance the budget. And he did. It was a ten-year plan, and it involved doing very little for the first eight years, and then doing the real work in years nine and ten - that is, after Clinton was out of office, even if he got a second term.

Then 1994 happened, and the Contract With America. The Republicans took both the House and the Senate, and they passed a balanced budget , then, whether Clinton liked it or not.

So that's what "Clinton" did. He pretended he was going to do something, and the Republicans called his bluff, and made him do it.

Note well: Republican majorities in any other set of circumstances have not yielded a balanced budget. I'm not saying that they're the answer (what they did under Trump shows that they very clearly are not the answer for fiscal responsibility). All I'm saying is that "Clinton balanced the budget", while technically true, isn't really the way that played out.

So all we have to do is engineer a scenario where one party screws over the other one by accidentally doing good governance.

Or just hurry up and invent ASI and let it be someone else's problem to take care of this crazy human zoo.

> The Republicans took both the House and the Senate, and they passed a balanced budget

And Clinton signed it, which is what matters. Now the Republicans have both the House and the Senate plus the WH, where's the "balanced budget"? Nowhere, don't ask for it, nobody is going to sign it either - ask for $ 1.5 T Mil Bill and record deficits if you want it to pass.

Do you know what the 1995 Mil Bill asked for?

The Contract With America was a one-off stunt, in other words - mud in the eyes of the electorate. Old glory stories are worthless when they contradict the present reality,

The two parties were run by literate, service minded, adults back in the day.

If you believe in fiscal responsibility of any kind, if you believe said is critical to the survival of the republic, if you want a better future for our children and grandchildren, then you can't possibly vote for either of these parties today. They are both complete and utter failures with no improvement in sight.

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