Congressional Analysts See Surpluses By ALAN FRAM Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress' top fiscal analyst sees modest surpluses as the starting point for this year's budget fight between President Bush and Congress, rather than the small deficits it envisioned in January, congressional officials say.
The Congressional Budget Office is expected to project on Wednesday that there will be small surpluses this year and next, assuming no tax cuts or spending increases are enacted, said the officials.
Lawmakers will use the numbers not as a prediction but to define a starting point for budget work in this year's session of Congress.
Dan Crippen, director of the nonpartisan CBO, planned to reveal the figures Wednesday in testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. The numbers were described by two officials speaking on condition of anonymity.
In January, CBO foresaw deficits of $21 billion this year and $14 billion in fiscal 2003, which starts next Oct. 1. Compared to the overall budget and the $10 trillion economy, most analysts consider deficits or surpluses of that size to be small.
The new surplus numbers have emerged largely because of recent data indicating that the recession is fading or over, the officials said. This includes last week's report that the economy grew at a 1.4 percent annual rate in the final quarter of 2001, surpassing an earlier 0.2 percent estimate.
The new figures are politically significant because they will likely lend momentum to conservatives and other Republicans who want the GOP to push a budget through the House this year that claims to be in balance.
To achieve that, House Republicans are likely to exclude the $77 billion price tag for 2003 of an economic stimulus package that Bush says he still supports, despite its rejection by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
"Absent that, there's no reason we shouldn't be in balance," said Rep. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., a leading advocate of keeping next year's budget in the black.
Bush's budget, released last month, projected deficits of $106 billion this year and $80 billion in 2003 if his tax and spending proposals were enacted.
Democrats and many Republicans have said deficits this year and next are likely because of bipartisan demands for new spending for defense, domestic security, farmers, education and other areas.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the new surplus figures would mean little because they ignored the price tags of policy changes Bush has proposed or that lawmakers are likely to make.
"You can balance the budget by just saying big chunks of it aren't really there, when we all know they are," Conrad said.
After four decades of annual deficits, the government has run surpluses every year since 1998.
CBO is also expected to project a slightly larger surplus for the decade beginning in 2003 than the $2.26 trillion it estimated in January, officials said.
Even so, the numbers are still expected to show that Bush's budget would use many hundreds of billions of dollars of Social Security surpluses over that decade to pay for other programs. That has been a major Democratic criticism of Bush's budget.
In recent years, Bush and many lawmakers had pledged to use that money only to reduce the accumulated national debt. That would strengthen federal finances so the government could more easily handle the looming retirement of the baby boom generation.
CBO is also expected to show a smaller surplus for 2003 through 2012 than the $1 trillion Bush projected if the tax and spending changes he has proposed become law. That is because CBO is still expected to use less optimistic economic numbers than the White House used in Bush's budget.