Mr. Bush's overly generous tax cut plan would wipe out virtually the entire remaining surplus.
Once some other issues were dealt with, the remaining surplus would be only $352 billion over 10 years, they concluded.
If the Social Security balance is stripped out of the 10-year budget projections, the candidates then propose to spend virtually all of the remaining surplus.
If Mr. Zandi is right, those moves will wipe out all of the remaining surplus and plunge the federal budget back into the red.
If we put Social Security and Medicare in "lock boxes," the remaining surplus amounts to $18 -- of which $16 will be used up by Mr. Bush's tax cut.
All or almost all of this year's remaining surplus will come from the Social Security system, which politicians in both parties have declared off limits for general spending or tax cuts.
Since the proposed tax cut would cost $2 trillion, or $2.2 trillion if an alternative minimum tax adjustment is included, it would entirely use up the remaining surplus, with no additional debt reduction.
If the lawmakers do not agree to forgo spending the remaining surplus, Mr. Rowland, a two-term Republican who may seek re-election in November, said Connecticut might need to dip into, if not liquidate entirely, its $600 million Rainy Day Fund, which the state has left untouched since he took office in 1995.
A scenario with a wind-solar energy mix of 80/20, on the other hand, both decreases the total amount of surplus and has a significantly higher potential for arbitrage of the remaining surplus.
The PLD chair lady, interviewed in 2005, was concerned that the remaining surplus would not be sufficient to finance future hardware replacement and suggested that cheaper Indonesian stand-alone solar home systems (SHS) might be adopted when the hybrid system failed.
