In the eighties, the relatively low ratio of U.S. national saving has been increasingly criticized. Many observers were concerned about its continued decline and the widening gap between the U.S. savings ratio and that of many other industrial countries. The savings rate decreased from an...

During the first half of the eighties, the U.S. federal deficit rose from $ 74 bn to $ 212 bn. When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in August 1985 that the deficit would further increase to $ 285 bn by 1990, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (GRH Act) was put into law. Its purpose is...