Last year, scraping for funds and juggling books, congressional leaders proposed parceling out the earned income credit in pieces rather than in a lump sum the working poor could actually use.
Vital services are what gives.
Two things are going on, neither of which is honest. First, assumptions about the surplus are quite phony. On-budget in this case means it does not use the surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund to mask the deficit as Washington has for years. But Social Security is only one trust fund that can be used in a deceitful way. And that's just one year's surplus.