Posted on: Wednesday, August 29, 2001

Editorial
Our budget surplus is quickly dwindling

White House and Congressional Budget Office forecasts agree that one of the nation's most remarkable achievements of the 1990s is slip-sliding away — the budget surplus.

We had an opportunity, had we chosen to bite the economic bullet for just a few more years, to make life far more secure for our children and our children's children — by paying off the national debt.

Freedom from the albatross of debt service would have been a magnificent legacy.

Instead, we are now discussing pushing back their retirement ages to 70 and beyond, and reducing their benefits to boot, merely to pay the bills for our own current wants and needs — increased defense and education spending, provision of a Medicare prescription drug benefit and a new farm subsidy program.

All this mainly because we believed President Bush when he told us we could have our cake and eat it, too.

Bush's No. 1 priority when he took office was a $1.6 trillion tax cut, which put $300 up front for the average taxpayer while offering millions in deep relief over time to our richest citizens. Indisputably, Bush's tax cut will accelerate growth of the gap between rich and poor in this country.

But it also takes us back to the selfishness of the politics of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, when we insisted on mortgaging our future to pay our current bills. Lyndon Johnson thought we could fight the Vietnam War and create a Great Society social program without a tax hike; Ronald Reagan thought he could bury the "Evil Empire" by outstripping the Soviets in military spending — without a tax hike. The result was a bone-crushing deficit, as well as forecasts that Social Security and Medicare would go belly-up in the not-too-distant future.

Now the White House is saying that there's no practical difficulty in dipping into the Social Security trust fund, which technically is true. (It's also true that it prevents the government from paying down the public debt as quickly as it otherwise could.)

But presidential candidate Bush promised not to dip into Social Security funds, and now his White House is manipulating numbers to suggest that Social Security money will be untouched, if just barely.

The Congressional Budget Office, which provides the forecasts that Congress is required to use for budgeting purposes, says we'll spend $9 billion of Social Security reserves this year — and that's without the additional spending that both the White House and most Congress agree is essential.

Just another broken campaign promise? Yes, but this one's a big one. Over the next 10 years, the CBO is forecasting a $3.4 trillion surplus counting Social Security, down from $5.6 trillion in its May forecast. We have cut the surplus by 40 percent in just three months.

Shame on President Bush for talking us into this fiscal irresponsibility; shame on us for falling again for a fiction we've foolishly believed many times before.