* Gary Denton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > I was pointing out that you were glossing over the fiscal > responsibility of Clinton and Gore who converted the annual deficit to > an annual surplus before chimp chump came into office.
Strange. I thought the subject under discussion at that time was whether the SS trust fund (and higher payroll taxes) raised national savings. If it did not, then the SS trust fund is not very meaningful from an economic perspective (certainly from a legal perspective it will be paid, but the economic implications are very different). I said that for almost all of the last 30 years, the government was not saving. You said that for 4 years of those 30 the government ran a surplus. Now you say that Clinton was more fiscally responsible than Bush. How is this relevant to a discussion about improving SS? Kerry said that changing SS was not an option for him, so it is likely that we wouldn't have had a chance to improve SS if he were elected If Clinton's economic policies had continued, SS would still have a funding deficit of trillions of dollars (economists were pointing out the SS deficit during the Clinton years, too). If the budget surplus continued (not certain, notice that the surplus decreased Clinton's last year -- a significant bit of the surplus was due to the booming stock market of the late 90's) then we could have paid down some of the national debt, which is a way of government saving equivalent to an individual investor investing in government bonds (tax free). So we would have been better off as a nation, but we STILL would have needed to do something about the SS funding deficit. So, I guess we got to pick our poison last November -- more fiscally responsible budgets but not open to changing SS, or less fiscally responsible but open to improving SS. I actually voted for the former, because possible SS reform was about the only thing I liked better with Bush over Kerry. Unfortunately, Bush won. I'm still hoping the February SS plan will give me at least one thing to be happy about with Bush. But I'm not holding my breath. If the Feb plan looks bad, I will be a loud critic. -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
