Posted on: Friday, January 25, 2002

Editorial
That budget surplus now only a pipe dream

White House and Congressional Budget Office forecasts suggest that one of the nation's most remarkable achievements of the 1990s — the budget surplus — is stillborn.

Including President Bush's next budget, we're now projected to return to deficit spending for the rest of his term. The $5.6 trillion surplus will be all but gone, an unrealized projection.

Of course, in the short term, a little deficit spending is excusable, even desirable. The traumatic events of Sept. 11 and the sharpened recession obviously required emergency spending.

But budget analysts say the lion's share of disappearing surplus comes, over the long term, not from military or homeland defense spending, or from economic stimulus, but from Bush's No. 1 priority last year, a tax-cut package totalling $1.6 trillion.

Last year, as the tax cut was debated, the administration said there was enough money to cut taxes and still increase defense spending as needed, pay down the national debt and cover pensions and health care for the retiring baby-boom generation.

By 2006, the CBO was estimating just last year, the government would be on track to paying off just about the whole federal debt.

Now that prospect is up in smoke.

What's frustrating is that the White House has insisted on squandering this opportunity for little more reason than making the rich richer. Ordinary folks received (how many of them remember it?) a $300 rebate. A comparatively few lucky rich folks, however, stand to realize millions as the estate tax is eliminated.

And now Bush is seeking a tax break that will refund billions to individual corporations, amounting to every penny of the income taxes they paid in certain years past.

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 using the budget surplus to pay off our national debt.

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

That goal might have been delayed a year or two by recent unforeseen events. But the opportunity is gone, chiefly because Bush insists upon making the rich richer now. Even if that stimulates some new investment or other forms of trickle-down benefits, it is a pale accomplishment compared to the dream of eliminating our national debt.