What Was In That Latte?

Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 with a federal budget surplus of $127 billion. President George Bush ran a deficit of $319 billion in 2005. So who deserves more credit for fighting red ink?

No question, says Treasury Secretary John Snow: It's his boss, Bush. Sipping a latte at a Starbucks coffee shop with reporters in Washington two days ago, he said that ``the president's legacy will be one of having significantly reduced the deficit in his time,'' and said Clinton's budget was a ``mirage'' and ``wasn't a real surplus.''

Snow said the Clinton surplus was inflated by a stock-price bubble and that Bush will be remembered for cutting the gap from a record $412 billion in the 2004 fiscal year.

``Snow's comment would be laughable if it weren't so pathetically and obviously inaccurate,'' said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution, a policy research group in Washington. Colleague William Gale, who worked on the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush, said calling members of the current administration ``deficit-fighters is completely at odds with all of their policies.''

Snow went on to say that Bush would have cut more from the deficit if it hadn't been for the costs of the enormous Easter Bunny bailout last Spring, and declining revenues from the Tooth Fairy department.