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To Balance or Not to Balance, that, well that's one of the questions. From American public media,

this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai, Residilates Wednesday, day 8 February. You can always have your long

everybody. We begin today with a not at all random historical fact relevant to the fiscal

policy discussions that Congress and the White House are going to be having over the next number of

months. The federal budget has been balanced, that is government revenue meeting or exceeding

government spending. It's been balanced exactly twice in the past almost 60 years. Lyndon Johnson in

1969 and Bill Clinton surplus from fiscal year 1998 to 2001. It wasn't easy then and it is not

going to be easy now, which I mentioned because balancing the federal budget is a key Republican

talking point. So we are going to talk about it a little bit. Linda Billness is a senior lecturer

at the Kennedy School at Harvard and she was in the Clinton administration the last time the budget

was balanced. Welcome to the program. Delighted to be here. Thank you. So President Clinton walks

into the room, whatever meeting you happen to be in and says, hey, bring me a balanced budget.

Then what happened? Well, then what happened is he realized that this was going to be pretty

...