When I became Speaker of the House in 1995, many in Washington considered balancing the federal budget impossible.
However, House Republicans believed that the American people would support balancing the budget and paying down the national debt. In fact, we believed that if they saw a practical doable plan to balance the budget, they would force the Democrats in Congress to go along with the idea. The American people would also convince President Bill Clinton that he had to support a balanced budget if he wanted to be re-elected.
With a lot of hard, determined work and a fair amount of problem solving and invention, we passed the only four consecutive balanced budgets in the last century. By 1999, then-U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified in the Senate that the Fed thought the national debt would be paid off by 2009 – and its economists were studying how to manage the money supply with no federal debt.
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