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Deficit Charade Continues with Greenspan's Blessing
While he is otherwise generally quick to ask the Congress to reign in its spendthrift ways, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan nevertheless endorsed anew accounting scam that has gone on for the last 13 years in his recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee.
The ranking Democratic member of the Committee, Senator Hollings of South Carolina, became critical of Greenspan in his questioning, charging that the Fed Chairman continues to endorse the practicof using surplus funds from Social Security, Medicare and other federal government trust accounts to mask the size of the ongoing budget deficit. While President Clinton gleefully runs around the country claiming credit for reducing the fical 1996 federal deficit to "just" $107 billion, Hollings pointed out, the truth is that total federal indebtedness actually increased by $261 billion last year. The difference is that the government's general fund was, in effect, loaned the $154 billion difference from these various trust funds, and replaced the money with IOU's.
Some will recall-as Hollings skillfully and often sarcastically did in the hearing - that it was Greenspan's own commission in 1983 that advocated building these surpluses in the first place, in order to cushion those various federal programs early in the next century when increasing number of retirees would cause a net drain on those monies.
Suggesting that this did not matter, since everthing ultimately comes out of "the same pocket" anyway, Greenspan said that this practic was just fine. He then ask the Congress to further "means test" Social Security, index future benefits to increasing life expectancies, and "encourage" retirees to work longer and pay even more taxes.
THIS FROM THE NATIONAL INVESTOR
This was the way they raised the TAXES without us (their slaves) reacting hostal.
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