text: How about the 4 years of surpluses that the republicans in the house created during Clinton? If you remember, we had the dot.com bubble bursting which caused a small recession in 2000, then we had 9/11, which had significant impact on the economy. Deficits went up, but after the tax cuts in 2002 and even after the war began in 2003, deficits went down beginning in 2004 until they bottomed out at 161 billion in FY 2007. Then after the democrats took control of the house in Jan. 2007, the deficit exploded to 458 billion in FY 2008. A 400 billion increase in the deficit due to democrats in the house in just one year. Of course they had help from Bush, who had trouble finding his veto authority.