President Obama is now on track to reduce federal deficit to $0.00

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/president-obama-is-now-on-track-to-reduce-federal-deficit-to-0-00/22373/

By Tim Martyn | September 13, 2015

President Obama has reduced the annual federal budget deficit by a full seventy percent since he inherited a $1.4 trillion annual shortfall from his successor George W Bush. And with the race of reduction now accelerating, there is now every reason to believe that Obama can reduce the annual deficit all the way to zero for his final budget before leaving office. This would make him the first U.S. President to eliminate the federal deficit since Bill Clinton.

The original estimate for the 2015 annual federal budget deficit was $583 billion, but that’s since been revised downward to $455 billion and then subsequently revised to just $426 billion. That means President Obama is closing the budget gap even more quickly than he had planned to, likely thanks to a combination of a steadily growing economy and the closure of tax loopholes for the wealthy that he implemented early in his tenure, along with a continued winding down of the perpetual ground wars of his predecessor.

Skeptics may point to the fact that according to the eight year calendar, just seventeen percent of his Presidency remains, while thirty percent of the deficit still needs to be cleared away. However this does not take into account that he’ll be setting the budget for the first year of the next Presidency before he leaves office.

So while the deficit may not be $0.00 at the time the next President is sworn in, there is increasing reason to expect that the annual deficit will in fact be zero by the time Obama’s final budget has run its course. Of course some observers and partisans will mistakenly give credit for Obama’s accomplishment to the next President, just as some are still mistakenly blaming Obama for running up Bush’s $1.4 trillion deficit to begin with.

Bill Clinton was able to full eliminate the annual budget deficit and create a significant surplus, but he inherited a much smaller deficit from his republican predecessor. Clinton’s surplus was frittered away by George W. Bush on tax cuts for the wealthy and land wars.

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From a comment on the article:

Don’t forget that Bush tried to wage his ill-begotten Iraq war “off the books.” He thought it was going to be short and they could use off-budget spending to pay for it initially and then just roll in the billions of dollars that would flow when Iraq’s oil began to flow again. Even when the war spiraled out of control, they were still using this dishonest tactic. Obama put it back on the books, which accounts for a big part of the deficits after he took office.