It depends on what the government is doing. Balancing bad spending with income is just as bad as anything.

UPDATE: Speaking of misleading . . . mag (I think) is referring to a report from the Cato Institute entitled, On Spending, Bush is no Reagan which compares spending levels of the two republican presidents. But to in some way imply that Clinton belongs in a category of responsible spenders is truly laughable. Clinton's budgets balanced, at the end of his presidency, because he had to fight a contrarian, republican Congress which waved the Contract with America in his face every year of his 2nd term. Budgets balanced due to the tax revenue increases brought on by the economic good times Clinton enjoyed during his 2nd term, not through any fiscal discipline (or even more laughably spending cuts) proposed by Bill Clinton. It's one thing to characterize Bush as not a true conservative with which I agree. But to characterize Bill Clinton as bringing anything resembling fiscal responsibility to the table is like saying the USSR had initiated peace talks. ORIGINAL COMMENT 5/12/05: Conservatives would always argue in favor of balanced budgets. And if the country adopted a truly conservative approach to government, balanced budgets would be easy to have, year after year, because the reach of government would be limited, and so would its budget. We're so far away from anything resembling a conservative approach to government, we can't even see the dock for the curvature of the earth. While republicans have held the majority in Congress for over 10 years, thanks to Bill Clinton's goofs, we're no closer to a conservative approach to government spending than we were under his leadership. It shows that not only democrats get drunk with power spending someone else's money.

You have got to be f@#king kidding me, right? Bust out the smelling salts. . .

I agree with EO's take - balanced budgets, in theory, is a foundation of fiscal conservatism. EO's assertion that we are no closer to a conservative approach to government spending then we were under his (Clinton's) leadership, is accurate, but grossly misleading. We are in fact much, much farther away under Bush than we were under Clinton. Without bringing up any other aspects of their respective presidencies, Bush is not even in the same ballpark as Clinton when it comes to discipline in spending our money. The numbers are there for all to see in the recent Cato Institute report.

I don't know if there are any politicians of any political persuasion who actually believe in balanced budgets. They say they do of course. But when it comes time to cut one of their favorite pork projects out of a bill they aren't so dedicated to fiscal responsiblity. Who says we didn't need that Lawrence Welk museum? Or that study about why frogs like water?