IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ntj/journl/v53y2000i3p459-72.html

Perspectives on the Budget Surplus

Author

Listed:
  • Auerbach, Alan J.
  • Gale, William G.

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Auerbach, Alan J. & Gale, William G., 2000. "Perspectives on the Budget Surplus," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 53(3), pages 459-472, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:ntj:journl:v:53:y:2000:i:3:p:459-72
    DOI: 10.17310/ntj.2000.3.09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2000.3.09
    Download Restriction: Access is restricted to subscribers and members of the National Tax Association.
    File URL: https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2000.3.09
    Download Restriction: Access is restricted to subscribers and members of the National Tax Association.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17310/ntj.2000.3.09?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. George J. Hall & Stefan Krieger, 2000. "Tax Smoothing Implications of the Federal Debt Paydown," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 31(2), pages 253-302.
    2. Ben S. Bernanke & Vincent R. Reinhart & Brian P. Sack, 2004. "Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound: An Empirical Assessment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 35(2), pages 1-100.
    3. Michael J. Fleming, 2001. "Financial market implications of the federal debt paydown," Staff Reports 120, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    4. Germinal G. Van, 2022. "The Theory of Efficient Growth," Journal of Economics and Econometrics, Economics and Econometrics Society, vol. 65(2), pages 68-91.
    5. Gale, William G. & Potter, Samara R., 2002. "An Economic Evaluation of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 55(N. 1), pages 133-186, March.
    6. Easterly, william, 2001. "Growth implosions, debt explosions, and my Aunt Marilyn : do growth slowdowns cause public debt crises?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2531, The World Bank.
    7. Haffert, Lukas, 2016. "Permanent budget surpluses as a fiscal regime," MPIfG Discussion Paper 16/1, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    8. Faisal, Faisal & Ramakrishnan, Suresh & Rahman, Sami Ur & Ali, Adnan & Sulimany, Hamid Ghazi H, 2024. "Asymmetric nexus between shadow economy and financial instability: Does institutional quality matter?," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 98(C).
    9. Mstislav Afanasyev & Natalia Shash, 2020. "Budget Surplus Management And Fiscal Fine Tuning," Public administration issues, Higher School of Economics, issue 6, pages 84-97.
    10. Peterson K. Ozili, 2020. "Tax evasion and financial instability," Journal of Financial Crime, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 27(2), pages 531-539, January.
    11. Douglas W. Elmendorf & Jeffrey B. Liebman, 2000. "Social Security Reform and National Saving in an Era of Budget Surpluses," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 31(2), pages 1-72.
    12. Vincent Reinhart & Brian Sack, 2000. "The Economic Consequences of Disappearing Government Debt," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 31(2), pages 163-220.
    13. Gale, William G. & Potter, Samara R., 2002. "An Economic Evaluation of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 55(1), pages 133-186, March.
    14. Douglas W. Elmendorf & Jeffrey B. Liebman & David W. Wilcox, 2001. "Fiscal Policy and Social Security Policy During the 1990s," NBER Working Papers 8488, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ntj:journl:v:53:y:2000:i:3:p:459-72. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The University of Chicago Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.ntanet.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.