Word: surplus
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...question du jour: Which party will be hurt the most by the reports of a shrinking federal surplus? U.S. Representatives and Senators, still scattered across the country for their August recess, are beginning to hear questions from constituents, many of whom are nervous: What might happen now that the pile of extra tax dollars isn't as huge as everyone originally thought? The politicians, not surprisingly, are busily crafting messages that blame the budget shortfall on the opposing party. What are the voters hearing? I decided to follow a Democrat and a Republican last week in hopes of finding...
...news wasn?t good: At the beginning of the year, when the surplus was still abundant, Hoyer had proposed increasing federal research money for chronic diseases like arthritis by $350 million for fiscal year 2002. The Bush administration had cut the program by $175 million, but Hoyer hoped the Appropriations Committee, on which he serves, would use the surplus to restore some of that funding...
...Suddenly, the huge surplus has vanished. Forget money for your aching joints, Hoyer told the seniors. The Office of Management and Budget was about to release figures revealing that with Bush's tax cut "we have spent the surplus as of today," he said. "It didn't take ten years to spend the surplus. It took 10 weeks, from the time the president signed the tax bill." Hoyer, who opposed Bush's large tax cut, knew this crowd would be disturbed by the new budget numbers coming out of Washington. The day before, Bush threw out his favorite...
...sped to Hoyer?s next speaking engagement, an aide handed his boss an Associated Press story reporting figures the Office of Management and Budget had just released. The tax cut, coupled with a declining economy, had indeed soaked up practically the entire current surplus, as Democrats had warned. The non-Social Security surplus would be just $1 billion in 2001 and not much more than that in 2002. Over 10 years, the non-Social Security surplus would be just $575 billion, down $850 billion from the forecast in April...
...then, a lot of other things were changing too. As summer arrived, as the economy kept sputtering and Congress enacted a $1.35 trillion tax cut, those rosy surplus projections began to shrink. Military health-care costs rose faster than missile-defense bills. The budget situation became almost impossible. For months, many analysts had been saying the only way Congress might go along with Rumsfeld's reforms was if he sweetened the deal by sprinkling goodies on key districts. But now the extra money was drying up. Rumsfeld went to the White House in July to ask for $38 billion more...