The president that Erskine Bowles, Bruce Reed, and I worked for dug our way out of the big budget deficits of the Reagan/GHW Bush era and created a balanced budget and long term surpluses by doing modest budget cuts, taxes on the wealthy, and strong economic growth.
With surpluses apparently having given way to deficits in the short run, and with the long-term surplus a fraction of what was anticipated a year ago, both parties are being forced to scale back plans for initiatives like providing retirees with help buying prescription medicine.
Congress and the White House will update their long-term surplus projections over the summer; both will rise substantially, reflecting the strength of tax receipts this year and the spreading consensus that the economy is capable of higher rates of noninflationary growth than in the past.
They said the long-term fiscal outlook remains bleak, and they renewed their argument that the root of the problem was Mr. Bush's insistence last year in pushing through a $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut on the basis of long-term surplus projections that were wildly optimistic.
But they said the assumptions behind the long-term surplus projections were conservative and that the nation was in no danger of a return to budget deficits of the sort that plagued the United States during the 1980's and 1990's.
Nor, of course, did Bush campaign on the pledge that he would take the long-term surplus in the federal budget he inherited from Clinton and turn it into more debt, during his term, than all of the presidents before him in American history put together.
It is held that in mammals, long-term surplus food intake results in energy storage in the form of triglyceride and may eventually lead to obesity.
For too long, conservatives in Congress have ignored the fact that if the U.S. paid the same costs per person for health care as other wealthy countries our nation would be looking at long-term surpluses, not deficits.
Even though the proposal serves their own interests over the long term (by systematically investing surpluses in depreciated areas, they're helping to ensure markets for their own exports), few are willing to sacrifice short-term economic supremacy for long-term sustainability.
It says its policy measures on negative gearing and superannuation will pay dividends in the longer term, building to higher surpluses than the Coalition, and that's what explains its larger surplus in the long term.
