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Surpluses go away before we can get 'em spent Back in the mists of the Clinton Administration, there was an Advertiser-Tribune editorial about the budget surplus. We can't seem to lay our hands on a copy, but the gist of it was this: Members of both parties were foolish in their wrangling about how to spend the surplus. Democrats were promoting a host of ways to spend the "extra" money that was projected up through the year 2013. They also wanted to use some of the dollars to shore up Social Security. Republicans wanted to put a tax cut at the top of their list. Both parties were paying lip service to paying down some of the national debt. We said that paying down the debt &emdash; as the actual dollars became available &emdash; was the best plan. That seemed better than elaborate plans to spend money that was only projected and might never be real. Now the government reports it has operated at a deficit for its most recent fiscal quarter. Could it be that spending surpluses before they occurred led to the disappearance of the surpluses? Who would ever have expected that? |
