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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (146634)	10/30/2014 7:33:25 PM
From: pcstel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

The Stock Bubble Created the Budget Surplus: Not Bill Clinton's Tax and Spending Policies cepr.net This leaves out the main cause of the budget surpluses at the end of the decade, the stock bubble. This point can be easily seen from examining the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections from May of 1996 for the 2000 fiscal year. At that time, the Clinton tax increases were all passed into law, so these were fully incorporated into the budget projects. So were the spending restraints. So what did CBO tell us? Its projections show that in the spending constraint scenario (discretionary spending would only rise in step with inflation) the deficit would be equal to 2.7 percent of GDP in 2000 (Summary Table 3). Instead we had a budget surplus of 2.4 percent of GDP (Table 1-1), a shift of 5.1 percentage points. In today's economy this would be equivalent to an unexpected drop in the annual deficit of $780 billion. This shift $780 billion drop was not due to policy changes but rather to the extra growth and tax collections spurred by the stock bubble. On the tax side, we see that CBO projected that revenue would be equal to 18.6 percent of GDP in 1996 (Table 2-3). It turned out that revenue in 2000 was equal to 20.6 percent of GDP (Table 1-2). This differences of 2 percentages of GDP was not due to any change in tax policy, it was due to faster than expected growth and the large amount of capital gains taxes collected as a result of the bubble. ( cbo.gov ABOUT THE CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY RESEARCH..... en.wikipedia.org The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) is an economic policy think-tank that has been described as both progressive [1] and left-leaning. [2] [3] CEPR was founded in 1999 by economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot. [4] Based in Washington, DC, They are described as both "progressive" and "Left-Leaning".... Like I said... only your poor distorted imagination... How everyone thinks they are so educated here is a mystery to me. And so it goes, PCSTEL