Word: surplus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Letting people invest their own money, says Bush, will produce better long-term returns than keeping all Social Security revenues in the hands of the government. So he uses about half the Social Security surplus--roughly $1 trillion--to give young workers the right to divert some of their payroll taxes to private savings accounts. Workers could then invest this money in stocks and bonds...
...TRILLION-DOLLAR HOLE By allowing workers to divert part of their payroll taxes to private accounts (Bush hasn't said how much this would be; the fraction his advisers throw around is one-sixth), Bush cuts the size of the Social Security surplus almost in half, reducing it about $1 trillion. And not using that money for debt reduction adds an additional $300 billion to the government's interest bill. These costs (along with his $1.6 trillion tax cut) mean it will take longer for Bush to eliminate the national debt, leaving less money in the future to guarantee Social...
...Gore can promise a boatload of money for programs (and another $480 billion for tax cuts) yet still lay claim to eliminating the debt because of the government's forecast of a gaudy $4.6 trillion budget surplus over the next decade. The projected income may or may not materialize, depending on how the economy performs, but it allows him to boast of putting aside $2.8 trillion for Social Security and Medicare while leaving a $300 billion "rainy-day fund" untouched. Although his Medicare plan would encourage price competition between managed-care providers - it's not the one-size-fits...
...surplus, of course, is what also allows Bush to propose a $1.6 trillion tax cut while promising to spend $402 billion (about twice what Clinton-Gore promised in 1992) on education, defense, health care and a prescription-drug plan. And for all Gore's talk about risky schemes that squander the deficit, it's worth remembering that spending the surplus on a big tax cut and somewhat smaller spending plans isn't inherently "riskier" than spending it on big spending plans and a smaller tax cut. Both men blow through the money. The challenge is to identify the priorities embodied...
...families with day care and college expenses or elderly parents to care for. Bush tries to spread the savings around to everybody who pays taxes. And that inevitably favors the rich. Bush seems to believe his plan is fair. But it's worth noting that the chunk of the surplus he would hand over to wealthy Americans could have been used to deliver, for example, a more generous Medicare plan for middle-class seniors, who would get a 50% subsidy for premiums under Gore's plan and only a 25% subsidy under Bush's. Does that mean that Bush...