[moregrist]

That’s just not true. At the end of the 90s the US had a budget surplus and there was a discussion of how we were going to handle it.

Then George W. Bush enacted a big tax cut in 2001 that no one remembers because it was heavily weighted toward the top 1%. Suddenly we didn’t have a surplus problem anymore.

[SideQuark]

The surplus had dried up before Bush’s election, as the dot com bust tanked federal tax revenues.

Bush tax cuts did add to the deficit though.

[pseudohadamard]

That wasn't necessarily Bush personally, who was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, but his strategists. The Republicans had convinced themselves that surpluses encouraged government spending so by wiping them out and "starving the beast" as they put it the resulting financial crunch would create a need to slash spending, cut social welfare, and reduce the size of government.

Actually now that it's set out like that, the strategists were just as much in la-la land as Bush was.

[jfengel]

But they never did starve anything. Even DOGE didn't cut a significant fraction of the budget. They just eliminated a bunch of ideological enemies and quit early.

They didn't even pretend to reduce the entitlement programs that they claim to hate, but are fiercely defended by the elderly, who overwhelmingly vote for them.

[Gud]

That George Bush the 2nd is a doofus is a finely crafted PR image.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

[bguebert]

There might have been a budget surplus but we were still in debt.

https://www.investopedia.com/us-national-debt-by-year-749929...

Here they show the debt increasing through the 90s but by less than most other decades. I don't know if it takes into account inflation though so maybe that would have made the debt have less value. Seems like they didn't use any of the surplus to pay off the debt.