Interesting analysis.
One thing my biased history book mentioned was how Reagan might've been the greatest politician ever. By forcing his successors to focus on the huge deficit continued under his Presidency, he really did force Clinton into the balanced budget. It was an interesting idea as to how he might've had the foresight or political knowhow to pull that off, but whatever. It was interesting, don't know about "true".
Putting aside there's no way he could have anticipated something like that there was no real balanced budget let alone a surplus.
The Republican Congress just borrowed from social security as usual. Hence why we had a "balanced budget" in the late 90s but debt in intragovernmental holdings went up significantly.
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