In The Magic Mountain: A Guide to Defining and Using a Budget Surplus (AEI Press), Kevin A. Hassett and R. Glenn Hubbard size up the correctly defined surplus and consider five policy options for dealing with it.

Polls ask American how they would prefer a budget surplus be spent.

It is all too clear that the holiday's diversion of general revenue from the Social Security trust fund has undermined historical practices and distorted federal budgetary priorities.

In the midst of general euphoria over a new and seemingly increasing federal budget surplus,this bookoffers a guide to this new situation.

Congress should either turn Social Security into a general revenue program with no earmarked taxes or make it a genuinely self-supporting program that receives no general revenue transfers.

There are some interesting pension developments in Argentina that shed some light on Social Security policy in the United States.

Oil production, made possible by the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is unlocking vast supplies of energy from the North Dakota's Bakken formation and putting it on an economic trajectory that is unmatched elsewhere in the country.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 9, 2007

AEI resident scholar and former Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas economist Alan D. Viard has the following observations about President Bush’s recently released $2.9 trillion budget which extends the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, cuts discretionary spending and projects a budget...