The Budget: A Surplus of Spin.(Bush administration is charged with using Social Security funds because of the tax rebates)(Brief Article)

Budget estimators in both the White House and Congress agree that this year the federal government is likely to run a surplus north of $150 billion. All this money will be used to pay down the national debt. In Washington, this seemingly happy state of affairs is held to be a major problem for the Bush administration. The reason: Almost all of that surplus is payroll-tax revenue generated by Social Security. It is possible that by the end of the fiscal year, Social Security will be all that is keeping the federal government in the black. So Democrats are charging that President Bush is "raiding" Social Security and that he is doing so because his tax cut has bankrupted the rest of the government.

The White House has offered several responses to this argument: 1) The economic slowdown has done more to shrink the surplus than the tax cut. 2) The component of the tax cut that has done the most to shrink the surplus is the tax rebate on which Democrats insisted. 3) The tax cut was supposed to shrink the surplus in order to keep the federal government from spending all the money. 4) Spending remains the real threat: In fact, spending increases that Congress legislated last December cut the surplus even more than the economic slowdown has. 5) The surplus remains the second-highest in history.

Bush is trying to have it both ways on ...