The Clinton Plan for Social Security: Bush'd.

One trillion dollars. $1,000,000,000,000. Greater than the entire annual Gross Domestic Product of India, Mexico, and the Russian Federation. Nearly half of the U.S. government's budget in a given year.

That was the projected surplus of Bill Clinton's ten-year economic plan as of 1998. In his plan, articulated in the same Georgetown Speech cited in the previous entry, projected annual surpluses between 1998 and 2010 could be used to fund the national debt. The economics of the exchange are complicated, but the plan entailed buying-up U.S. Treasury bonds owned by domestic investors, foreign investors, and national banks (such as that of Chinese government, which, along with the Japanese government, is the biggest funder of American debt). In effect, these bonds finance the budgetary shortfall of the U.S. government, and paying out the money owed to investors and national banks that hold these bonds would have fully financed the debt. Thus, interest payments that the U.S. government currently makes on the debt would be saved, and it was exactly these savings that would have been used to reconstruct a more workable Social Security program. One way to look at that trillion dollars is to see it as a downpayment on addressing the shortcomings of Social Security.

Alas, Clinton's 8-year shelf life ended acrimoniously in 2000, and in a twist of fate that will be forever lamented by posterity, George Bush defeated Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. And the Texas governor wanted to spend money like a teenage daddy's girl in Macy's.

Rather than maintaining the Clinton surpluses, Bush decided to distribute the extra money amongst the private sector. Money that was intended to finance the national debt became tax breaks for various segments of the American population. As 9/11 came to pass and the Wars propagated, spending increased as tax revenue decreased, and the debt remains higher than ever. The trillion dollars, as it were, no longer exists. And Social Security reform, once a possible feat, is more obscure than ever.

"Bush'd," one might say.