No, you are projecting 20th century libertarianism onto an era in which is made no sense. You can't be against the welfare state when there is no welfare state to oppose. Liberals of the 19th century were often very interventionist. Look no further then America's most famous 19th century liberal Abraham Lincoln. He is remembered for winning the civil war but it's often ignored how he engaged in massive government intervention into the economy to create the railroads. Or take Adam Smith who is the intellectual founder of 19th century liberalism and was strongly in favor of public works and public welfare spending. Just because the economy was different back then didn't make them libertarians.
Uh, European liberals today are STILL largely anti-welfare state and so on. The liberals of late 19th century Germany were also largely anti-welfare state. It was the reactionaries and monarchists alongside the progressives that pushed most of it through.
Lincoln was not a liberal (as if a liberal would suspend Habeus Corpus). Adam Smith was a liberal, but he was (A) a very early liberal economist, not a major representation of the liberal movement as a whole (as liberalism had barely developed by that time) and (B) a British liberal, who were always a bit different from mainland European liberals (represented by people like Bastiat, Molinari, Von Mises, etc). If you read the works of Bastiat, you can see he opposes public works and government spending the way a modern libertarian would.
Now you are just mixing up your arguments. If you want to talk about money not involved in shuffling around intragovernmental money then Clinton comes out even better: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=aiq
Clinton got that national debt under control.
Remember, the proper argument to slime Clinton is that the surplus in government liabilities to parties outside the government doesn't matter because of the money owed to the social security trust fund (which is comparing 2050 apples to 1995 oranges as I've said before).
I don't think I need much of a response for this one.
From the Treasury department itself:
Fiscal Year Year National Debt
FY1994 09/30/1994 $4.692749 trillion $281.26 billion
FY1995 09/29/1995 $4.973982 trillion $281.23 billion
FY1996 09/30/1996 $5.224810 trillion $250.83 billion
FY1997 09/30/1997 $5.413146 trillion $188.34 billion
FY1998 09/30/1998 $5.526193 trillion $113.05 billion
FY1999 09/30/1999 $5.656270 trillion $130.08 billion
FY2000 09/29/2000 $5.674178 trillion $17.91 billion
FY2001 09/28/2001 $5.807463 trillion $133.29 billion
National debt went up. The deficit did decline, but it didn't ever become a surplus. Next myth please.
And it's a very mendacious argument to say that budgets should be evaluated against the baseline of the worst economic crises of 70 years. It's also astoundingly bad economics.
Yeah, its bad economics to make a plan to balance the budget that doesn't rely on the economy spontaneously recovering and producing massive revenues. Again, cop out. Bad economics would be what led to the present crisis, or the ballooning deficit even in the boom years followed by a refusal to make spending cuts in the bust years.
I'm not talking about general healthcare cost price controls like in Massachusetts, I'm talking about Medicare overpayment rates through Medicare Part D for treating healthy seniors. They are vastly different creatures.
So the ACA isn't at all based off of the system in Massachusetts?
Solving the problems of your first dumb government program with a second dumb government program with its own (incredibly obvious) problems doesn't constitute a clever plan, it constitutes a mess. See here:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16011The CBO estimates that you dismiss out of hand here are at the heart of your previous arguments. Future Medicare costs are a very large portion of the future liabilities that you used to argue against the Clinton surplus. If you dismiss the CBO estimates out of hand without providing good reasons then you dismiss your own arguments out of hand.
First off, the CBO (and Ways and Means, etc) have actually
almost always underestimated the costs of medical care. If you can point me to significant examples of them either being right on the mark or shooting too high then I'll get into a bit more detail. Besides that, the CBO estimates showing a decline in price largely come from spending cuts that were packaged alongside the ACA. However, those spending cuts (such as the reimbursement rate reduction for doctors taking Medicare/Medicaid patients) have often found themselves postponed by congress, which isn't covered by the CBO estimations. In short, the parts of the ACA that actually cut spending are finding themselves being blocked while the parts that increase spending are going right on ahead.
Another reason is that it doesn't take the incredibly simple abuse of the "preexisting coverage" clauses. Logically speaking, no one is going to pay more for insurance when they can pay a cheaper fine and pay for insurance when they get into trouble or get sick. The poor don't even have to pay a fine, so they only need to wait until they get sick and then jump in and have the insurance company pay for their treatment. The rich and upper middle class largely are unaffected directly as they're already paying for insurance as it is (though it might indirectly change because of the new system, this would be hard to estimate obviously). The lower middle class, however, is effectively shafted as you either have to pay a fine or pay for insurance where previously you could just not get insurance in the first place were you healthy. Yet the fact of the matter is, even with the fine you just pick whichever is cheaper; the insurance plan or the fine. Because the fine is almost always going to be cheaper, most will go for it until they're actually sick, and will be more careless with their own health to boot. The only way the ACA can actually lead anywhere is it either going the way of Massachusetts or it simply evolving into an actual single payer system.
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