Word: surplus
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...Bill Clinton, for one, is shocked and appalled that those bad men would try to do such a thing. After all, he?s not keeping the surplus to pay off his Paula Jones legal bills; he?s just reinvesting it. "The Senate is about to make a pivotal choice: whether to move forward with a sound strategy that led us to this point, or to return to the reckless policies that threw our nation into stagnation and economic decline," boomed the president on Thursday. That last part, of course, is a canard. The last big tax cut was the Reagan...
...leadership maintains that they can do it all ?- save Social Security, save Medicare and slash taxes ?- and yet few, including moderates in their own party, seem to believe that. And Greenspan may have hit upon the reason why: this multi-trillion-dollar surplus, which materialized in the last year as if from thin air, is still just a promise -- a hunch, even -- by a bunch of Washington politicians. And it could disappear just as quickly. "Things are happening which we call technical factors, which is another way of saying we don't have a clue, and they could just...
...mighty surplus takes away the conservatives' most powerful weapon. In the campaign to roll back the welfare-state programs they hated, the deficit was an all-purpose weed whacker. Year after year, Republicans lived without big new tax cuts in return for the Democrats' giving up any hope of new spending. In that climate of discipline, the surplus took root. But it is much harder to keep those restraints in place when the Treasury seems awash in money. And those crowd-pleasing tax cuts? Though Republicans last week proposed a new capital-gains-tax reduction, it turns out the dreamy...
...carnival of surplus politics, it is harder to argue that Medicare and Social Security require big structural changes, like privatization, means testing or raising the age of eligibility--even though, back in 1935, when it was set at 65, the average life expectancy was 61. Conservatives now see the fruits of restraint bearing the seeds of future deficits, if Congress approves all kinds of new spending this summer that can't be cut back whether the surplus actually materializes...
...much depends on the projections' being right, when the happiest news of the year has been how wrong they turned out to be. Five years ago, the deficit for 1999 was projected at $207 billion. Last February the budget office announced instead we would run a $79 billion surplus; just four months later, it was $99 billion...