Fiscal Policy: Talk of Clinton-era tax rates ignores the fact that the former president, working with a GOP Congress, cut spending as a share of GDP and produced four balanced budgets by focusing on growth, not spending.

Even as he pushes $150 billion in new “stimulus” spending, President Obama argues that to avoid the fiscal cliff we must return to Clinton-era tax rates for wealthy households, with a top marginal rate of 39.6% vs. the Bush-era 35%. Clinton’s was an age of balanced budgets and economic growth.

But it was also an era of budgetary restraint in which both parties, not just the GOP, still produced budgets.

It was one, too, in which a Republican Congress led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich produced welfare reform, killed the precursor to cap and trade — Bill Clinton’s BTU tax — and stopped ObamaCare’s predecessor, HillaryCare, dead in its tracks.