Word: budgets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from Asia and still squeeze out a fairly good year. Some reasons for that strength: rising productivity, which is at last increasing workers' real wages without pushing up prices, and government policies that Sinai pronounces "eerily" wise. Most important, of course, is the swing from gargantuan budget deficits in the 1980s and early '90s to an expected small surplus this fiscal year, with more to come. Kaufman notes a continuing boom in business investments and a new surge in housing--both "very unusual" for an expansion going into its eighth year. One reason: builders of factories and houses can borrow...
...this virtuous circle keep spinning? Yes, says Robert Reischauer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, in line with the Congressional Budget Office he once headed. The CBO forecasts a small surplus of around $8 billion this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, rising to perhaps $140 billion in fiscal 2008. Reischauer cautions, however, that the projections assume that the White House and Congress can clamp a tight lid on nonmilitary spending. In recent years, continued rises in civilian outlays have been offset by plummeting defense expenditures, but that drop has left little more...
Another assumption is that the economy will grow steadily, continually pushing up tax revenues. Should there be one or more recessions instead, Reischauer thinks, the budget over the next 10 years or so would swing back and forth between "little surpluses" and offsetting "little deficits." Even that would mark the achievement, albeit more than 35 years late, of a goal once proclaimed by John F. Kennedy: a balanced budget over the business cycle...
...Institute, a libertarian think tank, is more exuberant. Government projections, he notes, are based on a 4% yearly increase in tax revenues--but, in fact, revenues have risen an average of 7% for the past five or six years. If that continues, he says, "you start getting very enormous budget surpluses very quickly": $40 billion to $50 billion this year, "well over $150 billion by the year...
Efforts by U.S. Forest Service chief MIKE DOMBECK to disentangle the USFS from the timber industry have provoked a fight with Congress. Republicans are so angry with Dombeck for hampering logging that on Thursday, in an unusual joint hearing, the House Resources, Budget and Appropriations committees will question Dombeck in what is likely to be a scorching job review. Convinced that tree cutting should no longer take priority over conservation and recreation, Dombeck, a former backwoods guide turned scientist, increased restrictions on logging. In his most significant step, he proposed halting construction of new roads in most of the national...