It is a balanced budget with a balanced approach to our national priorities. It maintains our fiscal discipline, pays down the debt, extends the life of Social Security and Medicare, and invests in our families and our future. Seven years ago, when I took office, we'd had 12 years of big deficits, a quadrupling of the national debt that had led to high interest rates and low growth. The new economic policy, as now we all know, has helped to create a new economy. The growth has been driven by private sector investment, not public sector spending, as was the case in the previous 12 years.
Federal deficits are last century's news.
We're on the way to an achievement that only a few years ago would have been inconceivable, making America debt-free for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. If you look at the chart behind me, you will see the mountain of debt that built up during the 12 years before I took office, and what has already been done to reverse the trend. But you can also see that the debt is still high, far too high. I have practiced this in the back. When I did it in the back, the paint spilled everywhere, and I commented that in every good effort there are still fits and starts.