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Last week the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that a system with 250 land-based interceptors, backed by many congressional Republicans, would cost $60 billion--more than double the $25.6 billion the Pentagon projected for a 100-interceptor system. The U.S. space shield's satellites would detect the launch of an enemy missile and cue ground-based radars to find it. Data on its path would be downloaded into the interceptors before their launch from mainland Alaska bases, with updates radioed to them in flight. Four interceptors, fired two at a time, would be dedicated to each incoming warhead...
...proposed hardware has been shown to work. In fact, there is concern that the new, more powerful booster--which will shake the kill vehicle 10 times as hard as the test booster now being used--could damage its own optics or electronics and render "the interceptor impotent," the CBO said last week. Critics say foes could overwhelm the system with cheap decoys. They note that it will do nothing to keep terrorists from smuggling a weapon into the U.S. Clinton has said he will decide by fall whether or not to build such a system, based on the threat...
...Under no circumstances will I vote to spend one penny of the Social Security trust fund on anything but Social Security," declaimed DeLay at the launch. Yet just hours later, the Republican-led Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the GOP's current spending plan for next year would siphon at least $18 billion of the fund's surplus. And that, it said, was a conservative estimate. DeLay and the rest of the GOP leadership had little to say about the apparently glaring contradiction; the GOP rank and file sound worried. Under nocircumstances? "That's kind of an absolute statement...
...Fellas, it's out. "The Republicans have really put themselves in a box on this," says TIME congressional correspondent John Dickerson. "The CBO numbers are only a projection - the Republicans can still keep their promise. But to do it they'll have to continue to perform these ridiculous contortions that Clinton and the Democrats will have a field day with." Such as budgeting the 2000 census - on the calendar since 1789 - as an "emergency." Such as that plan to create a phantom "13th month" to hide more spending-cap spillover. Such as messing with the $2,000 earned income...
...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...