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Wait, though. That's only the beginning. Estimates are that with no change in current policy Washington over the next 10 years will collect a mind-boggling $2.9 trillion more than it spends--$1.9 trillion in the Social Security trust fund, and $1 trillion as an excess of tax collections over spending for everything else the Feds do. The $1 trillion overage is the size of the entire federal budget in 1987 and, paradoxically, creates a problem for politicians that they have never faced before: How best to channel that torrent of cash...
...actually going to occur." That would imply surpluses even greater than projected--a prospect confirmed by Allen Sinai, chief global economist for Primark Decision Economics, a forecasting firm. Sinai's "baseline" forecast, assuming no changes in taxes or spending patterns, is for a non-Social Security surplus of $1.3 trillion, or 30% above the official guess for the next decade...
...Medicare, pensions for military and civilian government employees, highway building and other things. Without those nonpublic borrowings, he contended, the government ran a deficit of $127.8 billion last fiscal year, and the debt, including amounts owed by one part of the government to another, is still rising from $5.6 trillion. Other board members conceded that Hollings' numbers were correct but strongly quarreled with his interpretations. Kasich, Munnell and Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers all insisted that internal-transfer payments do not burden the government as a whole; it is the $3.5 trillion borrowed from the public that must...
Which introduced one of the revolutionary implications of the surpluses that the board majority agreed really are in prospect. At TIME's meeting, Summers indicated that the $3.5 trillion public debt would be wiped out completely if all the Social Security surpluses and part of the non-Social Security surpluses projected to emerge over the next 15 years were used to pay it off. That would create a host of new challenges for economists and currency traders. What kind of security, for example, could replace the 30-year Treasury bond as the bellwether of bond trading and as a particular...
Cumulative surplus: $2.9 trillion...