Clinton: The Surplus Is Huge — Wanna Split It?

Bill Clinton wants legacy so badly, he's willing to pay $250 billion for it. With Magic Marker in hand and the Rose Garden as a backdrop, Clinton on Monday announced a new surplus windfall. Excluding Social Security surplus funds, which both Democrats and Republicans agree should be set aside, the federal government is $1.9 trillion in the black in the period from 2001 to 2010. And after the usual self-congratulation, Clinton looked ahead to his summer budget battle with congressional Republicans and offered them a deal.

The terms: Give the President his $253 billion plan to add prescription drug benefits to Medicare, and he'll sign the Republicans' "marriage penalty" tax abolition, which would cost about $250 billion over the same 10-year period. Certainly there is extra money floating about these days — the new $1.9 trillion surplus figure is up almost threefold from a February estimate of $746 billion. Of course, the difference is 75 percent accounting. Revisions of average annual economic growth predictions, from 2.7 percent to 3 percent for each of the 10 years, beefed up the numbers by almost an even trillion. And the surplus is based, as usual, on pipe-dream budget numbers, but then again, nobody's interested in being a wet blanket.

No, wait — Clinton is! "The projections could be wrong," he said. "They could be right. That's why we shouldn't spend it all now." Just $500 billion of it, split down the middle, for a good cause: One bit of legacy for Clinton and one for this Republican Congress. Fair enough? Afterward, Republicans couldn't have acted less interested. To them, a compromise offer from a lame-duck President means just one thing: Hold out for more. Especially when George W. Bush is up 13 percent in the polls.