The Dems gave President Bush a surplus the year he came into office. Two tax cuts, two wars and a prescription drug plan later, no surplus. I mean who would have thought the dems were capable of such things............

lets hear you complain when you're on the dole for retirement or disability. Like most people that worked for 25-30 years or so we paid into it, quit acting like social security is just for welfare recipients it is an insurance every american that pays into earns.

To Timber1647--A Republican Congress was the reason the budget got better. Along with a surplus so generously given to President Bush he also inherited a recession, the final collapse of the DotCom era, along with the Eron/Wordlcom scandals, 9/11, Katrina, Afghanistan and Iraq. While these things all contributed to a hit on our economy some how President Bush was able to create an economic enviroment that for all of 2006-2007 this country enjoyed a 4.6 unemployment rate. Things went south because of lack of oversight by the Federal Reserve and Barney Franks and Chris Dodds Housing and Finance committies(and all the sub committies). As far back as 2003 President Bush was asking these guys to take a closer look at Freddie and Fannie. They chose not to. Barney Franks went before some committee and stated back in early 2007 that there was nothing wrong with the housing market, by the middle of 2007 the market was in a downward spiral. Again thanks for the surplus.

ED: The recession officially began in March 2001 and ended November 2001. If you think Bush "inherited" it then you must agree that our most recent recession lasted 15 months under Bush and 7 months under our current president (sonce you don't think Bush was responsible for Dec. 2000 through March 2001 even though he was president). Bush's second recession he didn't inherit "officially" began December 2007. I say "officially" because for almost a year Bush said we were not in a recession because we didn't have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, but most economists said all the other indicators -- such as rising unemployment, which continued upward for 7 months -- indicated that we were more in a recession than in a period of growth. (You might want to look at a chart of the unemployment rate during his tenure. Bush took office when unemployment was 4.2 percent. Thirty months later it was 6.3 percent, and it took him three years to get it back down; then it shot from 4.4 to 8.2 between May 2007 and Feb. 2009, so it almost doubled under Bush.) Things just looked okay because everyone was still spending, going deeply into debt buying stuff that they couldn't really afford, often using the paper equity they had in their homes. And yes, Bush had all those things to contend with, including those two wars OF CHOICE, that added at least $1 trillion to the debt (probably more, since so many of the "special appropriations" that paid for them were not in the budget. As for Bush's great economic climate of 2006-2007, what you're really saying is that Barney Frank was resopnsible for it. The economy was already heading down because it was based on the housing market, not on job growth, wage growth, economic expansion or any other things that indicate a robust economy. The plummeting recession that officially began in 2007 didn't stop freefall until October 2009.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000