Word: surpluses
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With little money but plenty of boyish zeal, Pregracke began to enlarge upon his ambitions. He hunted up a couple of outboard motors, the barges, two aluminum runabouts and an Army-surplus bridge-building boat, which he equipped with a John Deere combine cab to make a sort of tugboat. He raised a sinking houseboat, made it seaworthy, assembled an eager young crew and hit the river--vowing to spend his summers on the water until the job was done...
Bill Clinton wants legacy so badly, he's willing to pay $250 billion for it. With Magic Marker in hand and the Rose Garden as a backdrop, Clinton on Monday announced a new surplus windfall. Excluding Social Security surplus funds, which both Democrats and Republicans agree should be set aside, the federal government is $1.9 trillion in the black in the period from 2001 to 2010. And after the usual self-congratulation, Clinton looked ahead to his summer budget battle with congressional Republicans and offered them a deal...
...Give the President his $253 billion plan to add prescription drug benefits to Medicare, and he'll sign the Republicans' "marriage penalty" tax abolition, which would cost about $250 billion over the same 10-year period. Certainly there is extra money floating about these days - the new $1.9 trillion surplus figure is up almost threefold from a February estimate of $746 billion. Of course, the difference is 75 percent accounting. Revisions of average annual economic growth predictions, from 2.7 percent to 3 percent for each of the 10 years, beefed up the numbers by almost an even trillion...
This is what Gore aides call the "economic disqualifier" for Bush--the notion that when voters focus on the race, they'll choose Gore's policies and track record over Bush's. Pointing to gaudy new estimates of the ballooning budget surplus, Gore proposes to spend the money in "disciplined" ways to keep the prosperity going while Bush would "squander" it and "put prosperity beyond our reach." In an interview with TIME last Friday, Gore warmed to this theme: "The new estimates really bring into sharp focus not only the success of the past eight years, but also...
...cash shortfall down the road, and both seem to stick future generations with the bulk of the bill. But all that hard truth hardly matters in an election year. These plans, for the moment, anyway, are about immediacy - and about capitalizing on a bountiful economy and a much-discussed "surplus." As the Democrats learned in the 1980s, talking about impending "hard choices" is the fastest way to lose an election. Lesson learned, Gore and Bush came up with these new, vaguely problematic blueprints, which are much less about financial realities than about winning the presidency...