|
 udget
estimators in both the White House and Congress agree that this
year the federal government is likely to run a surplus north of
$150 billion. All this money will be used to pay down the national
debt. In Washington, this seemingly happy state of affairs is held
to be a major problem for the Bush administration. The reason: Almost
all of that surplus is payroll-tax revenue generated by Social Security.
It is possible that by the end of the fiscal year, Social Security
will be all that is keeping the federal government in the black.
So Democrats are charging that President Bush is "raiding"
Social Security and that he is doing so because his tax cut has
bankrupted the rest of the government.
The White House
has offered several responses to this argument: 1) The economic
slowdown has done more to shrink the surplus than the tax cut. 2)
The component of the tax cut that has done the most to shrink the
surplus is the tax rebate on which Democrats insisted. 3) The tax
cut was supposed to shrink the surplus in order to keep the
federal government from spending all the money. 4) Spending remains
the real threat: In fact, spending increases that Congress legislated
last December cut the surplus even more than the economic slowdown
has. 5) The surplus remains the second-highest in history.
Bush is trying
to have it both ways on the rebates, claiming credit for the checks
going out to taxpayers but not taking responsibility for their cost.
Otherwise, these are all good points. They do not, however, solve
his political problem. The president pledged to "protect"
the Social Security surplus, that is, to use none of it to cover
spending on other programs. It was an ill-considered pledge: It
commits the federal government to keep overtaxing the country —
by $150 billion this year, and more later — to pay down debt.
That debt paydown does very little to benefit future Social Security
beneficiaries. The money could be better used to improve our military
or to finance tax cuts that would promote growth. And if revenues
prove disappointing, the pledge will be difficult, if not impossible,
to keep.
President Bush
can try to keep the pledge by vetoing spending bills. But the White
House has already all but conceded the emptiness of the pledge.
By trumpeting the fact that the total surplus remains high, his
aides implicitly suggest that it is pointless to treat the finances
of one program as separate from those of the rest of the government.
The president should not allow his priorities to be vanquished by
an accounting fiction.
|
