Perspectives on the Budget Surplus

Alan Auerbach and William Gale

National Tax Journal, 2000, vol. 53, issue 3, 459-72

Abstract: This paper provides alternative measures of federal budget surpluses over 10-year and long-term horizons. Official baseline budget forecasts are based on a series of statutory requirements that may be at variance with reasonable expectation. More plausible notions of current policy toward discretionary spending, taxes, and retirement trust funds imply that surpluses over the next 10 years will be substantially smaller than the baseline forecasts indicate. Properly accounting for long-term imbalances in social security and the rest of the budget implies that, under plausible definitions of current policy, the federal government faces a long-term shortfall.

Date: 2000
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2000.3.09 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2000.3.09 (text/html)
Access is restricted to subscribers and members of the National Tax Association.

Related works:
Working Paper: Perspectives on the Budget Surplus (2000)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ntj:journl:v:53:y:2000:i:3:p:459-72

Access Statistics for this article

National Tax Journal is currently edited by Stacy Dickert-Conlin and William M. Gentry

More articles in National Tax Journal from National Tax Association, National Tax Journal Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The University of Chicago Press ().