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 The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.

Calls budget surplus `magic trick'

Web posted September 14, 1999

Editor, The Chronicle

If you think that David Copperfield making an elephant disappear was a good magic trick, ``You ain't seen nuthin' yet.'' Congress can make a surplus disappear so fast that the American people won't even know we had one; if we ever get a surplus, that is. Prior to the end of fiscal year 1998, the almost forgotten co-sponsor of the old Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget act, Sen. ``Fritz'' Hollings, D-S.C., attacked tax cuts he said would gut the Social Security Trust Fund.

Both the conservative Concord Coalition and the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also opposed any tax cuts.

Sen. Hollings reported that a Congressional Budget Office study supports his statement that the only way to offer a tax cut is to raid the Social Security system.

In this recent report the CBO predicted that 98 percent of the estimated $1.55 trillion in federal surpluses over the next 10 years will be attained by the build-up of Social Security reserves, which are suppose to keep the Social Security system solvent until 2032.

At the end of fiscal year 1998, The Chronicle announced in big black letters ``Surplus replaces deficit, at $70 billion, excess for this fiscal year is largest ever, ending three decades of budget shortfalls.''

Of course, there isn't really a desk drawer at the U.S. Treasury Department stuffed with $70 billion in it.

The federal government pilfered, stole and looted the Social Security Trust Fund to the tune of $102 billion. Without this $102 billion there would have been a $32 billion deficit in its operating budget, not a $70 billion surplus.

The trickle down theory (a.k.a. ``Voodoo economics'') was that if we gave the rich big tax cuts the money would trickle down to the poor, but the money didn't trickle down from the wealthy. The present tax cut proposal isn't supposed to help the poor much either. ...

Richard Amundson, Augusta