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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (143235)	5/7/2001 9:37:55 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Ish, 01/31/2001 5,716,070,587,057.36 05/01/2001 5,651,070,445,048.89 Given that the 2001 budget was signed by Clinton, and that no economic legislation has been signed by Bush, that makes a pretty strong case for Clinton's claim that the debt is being paid down. Scumbria

To: Ish who wrote (143235)	5/7/2001 11:41:40 AM
From: Larry S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

ish, You are quoting "Gross Public Debt" numbers. This debt includes the debt held in Government accounts such as in the SS Trust Fund. I suggest that you examine the Monthly Treasury Statements. They are available at fms.treas.gov. Look at the Sept 2000 statement and you will find that the "unified surplus" for fiscal 2000 was 237 billion but the "on budget" component was only 87.2 billion. If you dig further you will find that, if you subtract all of the payroll tax surplus dollars, the on-budget surplus would be less than 57 billion. More importantly, you will find that for every dollar of debt "held by the public" that was redeemed, there were dollars of debt added to the Trust Funds, some on-budget and some off-budget. If you break down the debt, you will find that the debt held in Government accounts was 2.2 billion while 3.4 billion was held by the public (see Table 6). If you dig further, you will find that nearly half of the 2.2 billion is in Trust Funds associated with SS. The other half is Funds associated on-budget accounts. These Funds are effectively accounting gimmicks even though we pay interest on their balances. It is not appropriate to consider the Funds associated with those accounts funded from the payroll tax as accounting gimmicks because the tax is dedicated to the particular program and structured accordingly. In any event, all of the unspent dollars in Government accounts are moved to the general fund and replaced with special Treasury securities. The dollars are then spent. [One key to understanding the way we handle (hide) interest paid on debt held in Government accounts, you must examine Table 5 and the item "undistributed offsetting receipts".] If you care to go further and understand what our Government is planning for us, look at the websites for SS and the CBO. You will find on the CBO website details concerning their projection through 2011. You will find that the on-budget component of the projected surplus is smaller that the off-budget portion through 2006 and that, if you pull out all of the surplus dollars that are the result of the accounting nonsense, the projected on-budget surplus would not dominate until 2008. You will also find that the debt held in our SS Trust Fund, is projected to exceed 6 trillion but about 2015. You will also find that this surplus is largely the result of increases in the pay roll tax enacted during Reagan and Bush years. When Presidents speak, they ignore the debt held in Government accounts. Yes, you will find that Clinton continued that practice initiated by Johnson, of lying about the our debt. But, in my book, Bush has taken it one step further and is even more corrupt, if that is possible. He claims the high moral ground and concern about our children, yet he would leave them burdened by our debt created so that we could enjoy the good life. Larry