U.S.: Treasury Secretary Sees 'Golden Age'

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Headline: Treasury Secretary Sees 'Golden Age'

Source: The Associated Press, 24 June 2001

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010624/aponline134915_000.htm

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Sunday that the country is "on the edge of a golden age of prosperity," describing the current economic slowdown as an "adjustment period."

"I think we're not doing badly for the kind of correction that we're in right now," O'Neill said on ABC's "This Week."

"It's easy to find gloom and doom, but consumers are hanging in there, their spending rates are still quite good," O'Neill said. "The contraction occurred ... in the investment sector, where we had an overexpansion."

The Treasury chief was less optimistic about the future of Social Security. "We're headed toward a situation where we're going to have a lot more people retired and a lot fewer workers providing payroll taxes, that we've got to do something different," he said. The answer, he said, is the Bush plan to let workers invest some of their Social Security contributions into personal savings accounts.

"It's a big idea," O'Neill said. "It's time for us to make every American into a wealth accumulator, not a creator of an entitlement benefit."

[Comment: Perhaps he’s right about that "golden age," or perhaps we should enter him as the first contestant in a future "Irving Fisher Award." I strongly suspect that latter.]

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), June 25, 2001

Answers

I've long thought that there would be some kind of Golden Age, somewhere down the road. But, talk of adjustments make me nervous. Before such a Golden Age comes to pass I think a steep slide into a valley is imminent, with crawl-back time - maybe slow, maybe fast - but very painful.

-- Wellesley (wellesley@freeport.net), June 25, 2001.

Golden Age or rose colored glasses? Blessed be he who expects little, for he shall never be disappointed! Re the economy, we are in pretty good shape for the shape we are in. But, we really ought to be concerned about the Ponzi scheme misnamed "Social Security". How about abolishing it? By what Constitutional right does the federal government steal peoples earnings with the "promise" to give them back 40 to 50 years later when it's worth half as much? You want to make people wealth accumulators? Stop stealing from them directly (taxes) and indirectly (inflation).

-- Warren Ketler (wrkttl@earthlink.net), June 25, 2001.

We are in pretty good shape, for the shape we are in ....I like that. It says a lot.

-- R2D2 (r2d2@earthend.net), June 25, 2001.

The gap is getting wider between the rich and poor. The middle class will eventually shrink. This could be a major threat to democracy in the U. S. The rich "upper class" will call all the shots. The middle class will bear the brunt of providing the social services (via taxes) for the increasing number of people living in poverty. The poor will have to "beg the king and pray".

-- K (infosurf@yahoo.com), June 26, 2001.

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