A New Threat to the President's Agenda: The Tax Cut Democrats are indeed gasping. They are already warning that Congress will face painful tradeoffs when it returns from its summer recess next month and begins wrangling in earnest with Mr. Bush over next year's spending bills and the array of policy choices within them. But Mr. Bush cannot breathe freely, either. Just two months after he signed it into law, the tax cut that once seemed an unalloyed triumph now threatens to complicate the rest of his agenda and expose him to political peril. From his plans for modernizing the military and developing a national missile defense to his aspirations of becoming the education president and tackling long-term issues like Social Security, Mr. Bush might have trouble paying the tab. At the same time, he has left himself open to accusations from Democrats that the tax cut will plunge the government back into budget deficits of a sort. The buffer left in the surplus following his tax cut appears to be eroding rapidly because of the flagging economy. Both Congress and the White House will update their surplus projections by the end of the month. It is possible the new figures will show the budget in the current fiscal year dipping into money that Democrats and most Republicans had considered off limits � the excess revenues being generated by Medicare. Raiding Medicare, as the Democrats put it, would be a tricky enough charge for the White House to deal with. But it could get worse. Within a year or two, the government may again start spending the Social Security surplus, breaching a bulwark against fiscal irresponsibility agreed to by both parties and the administration. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/12/weekinreview/12STEV.html