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To: Don Lloyd who wrote (9046)	9/13/2001 10:43:51 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Don - don't know if you watch C-Span, or listen to C-Span radio. My impression is that only masochists and political junkies do (is that redundant?) but you are into politics, so maybe so. It's what I listen to when I am in the car, most of the time. Before the attack, Congress was preoccupied with "what to do with the surplus"? There are two surpluses, the on-budget surplus, and the Social Security surplus. The projections for the on-budget surplus are not all that high anymore but the projections for the Social Security surplus are somewhere in the range of $150 billion if memory serves me. Now, let's clarify matters so we don't have to do it later. The US does have a significant deficit, if you mean money which the US has borrowed to fund government operations. We do not have a balanced budget, with money left over. However, there are reasons, and I think you know them as well as I do, why neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seriously propose paying down all the national debt. The main reasons, as I understand it, are that the long term bonds can't be called, that is, paid off without the agreement of the borrowers, but even more important, the Fed needs to have access to Treasury debt for open market operations, aka liquidity. I am not endorsing these ideas, just reporting them as I understand them. With respect to the surplus, this is money which is not already earmarked for the budgets submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2001, nor fiscal year 2002. So the question is, what to do with that money? It's already "there." No new taxes will need to be passed, no new dollars will need to be printed. It's money that you and I and the rest of us owe Uncle Sam, either as income tax or payroll tax, most of it payroll tax (Social Security). So, do they put it in a lock box, do they give it back, or do they spend it? Looks like that question has an easy answer, all of a sudden.