http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/502455513

Maintaining Budgetary Discipline: Spending and Revenue Options

Until recently, large and persistent deficits dominated the federal budget. For most of the past two decades, lawmakers struggled to find common ground on new policies that would eliminate those deficits. In the l980s, their efforts met with little success; but in the 1990s, a strong economy and the end of the Cold War combined with a series of three multi-year budget agreements in 1990, 1993, and 1997- to produce a dramatic reversal in the federal budgetary outlook. The reversal happened with stunning speed, well in advance of predictions. Fiscal year 1998 ended with a sizable surplus of about $70 billion in the total budget (that is, including Social Security and the Postal Service, which are off-budget). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that under current policies and current assumptions about the economy, surpluses in the total budget will continue and will grow substantially. Over the 1999-2009 period, they are expected to total about $2.7 trillion. Excluding off-budget spending and revenues, small on-budget deficits continue through 2000 but give way thereafter to growing on-budget surpluses that are projected to total about $800 billion through 2009.1.

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