Word: surpluses
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...plan isn't ready for prime time and neither is Bush. Gore may need to emerge from the shadow of Bill Clinton (who offered Monday that neither plan was as good as his from a few years ago: setting up the individual accounts with money from the current surplus instead of payroll taxes), but he's still running as an incumbent. The status quo, and the current demographics of the voting public, will be Gore's best asset...
...Saving and patience. Gore's plan is to stay the course Clinton set out but never quite got to embark upon. He wants to use the surplus the fund is currently running to pay down the national debt over the next decade or so, putting the economy on sounder footing and freeing up more money (which now goes to debt servicing) to keep the fund going a while longer. It's a stall tactic, but one with tangible overall benefits in the meantime...
...Expecting that kind of fiscal discipline from future presidents and Congresses is not a great bet. The budget surplus the government supposedly has now is basically a fantasy based on a three-year-old budget and optimistic economic projections. There's little good reason to believe that Gore's successors would be able to keep up such a schedule, or even that Gore himself would be able to get such a program out of the hangar in the first place...
...evidence so far is inconclusive. The man in city hall has at times displayed a brand of competence unlike any we saw from Barry. The city is on the verge of a third straight budget surplus. The new police chief, Charles Ramsey, is remaking our laughingstock of a police department into an impressive law-enforcement agency; it not only handled the recent protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund with aplomb but also arrested a teenage suspect in the zoo shooting only 24 hours after it happened. A burst of new charter schools is providing students with educational...
Indeed, school systems in rural Maine and New York City are eager to follow Arace Middle School's example. Governor Angus King has proposed using $50 million from an unexpected budget surplus to buy a laptop for all of Maine's 17,000 seventh-graders--and for new seventh-graders each fall. The funds would create a permanent endowment whose interest would help buy the computers. The plan, scaled back to $30 million in a compromise with the legislature, is scheduled to be voted on this week...