Word: surplus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hard for many Americans to believe, but the United States' checkbook hasn't always been in the red. Aside from periods of war or economic turmoil, the federal budget was actually in surplus for most of the nation's first 200 years. The government incurred considerable debt during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War but paid it off by the early 1900s. Between 1901 and 1916, the budget was almost always balanced. But then came the Great Depression followed closely by World War II, which resulted in a long succession of deficits that caused the federal debt...
...federal government's spending oscillated over the subsequent decades, running a surplus in the good years and a deficit in the bad ones, until the early 1980s. President Ronald Reagan's economic and foreign policies - tax cuts combined with substantial increases in Cold War-era defense spending - led to a string of deficits that averaged $206 billion a year between 1983 and 1992. The balanced-budget acts of 1990 and 1997 helped reverse this unprecedented level of peacetime spending, and in 1998 the U.S. recorded its first budget surplus in nearly 20 years...
...shrouded in mystery. The history of the gang and its current membership are murky topics, and what goes on inside its secretive clubhouses tends to stays there - just as the bikers want it. The Hells Angels Motorcycle Cub began in Fontana, Calif., in 1948, at a time when military surplus made motorcycles affordable and the placid postwar years left many veterans bored and itching for adventure. A vet named Otto Friedli is credited with starting the club after breaking from one of the earliest postwar motorcycle clubs, the Pissed Off Bastards, in the wake of a bitter feud with...
California's crisis winds all the way back to 1978's Proposition 13, which cut property-tax rates 57% and forced the state to rely more heavily on income tax revenue. When Californians were wealthy, the tactic generated a surplus, enabling politicians to cut taxes, pad budgets and bask in their popularity. But when times were lean, the state struggled to pay its bills. Governor Pete Wilson encountered this dilemma in 1991, as did Gray Davis in 2003. Now it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn to try to wrestle a highly partisan legislature into slashing enough programs to eliminate...
Rolling in Dough 1998 California records a $4 billion surplus. State leaders agree on a $1.4 billion...