Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 15, 1993                   TAG: 9311150026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID HESS and FRANK GREVE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING?

The pennies add up to $103 billion, much of which would be carved from job training, education and other spending the White House believes is badly needed.

In addition, the new plan would cut heartily from Medicare and simply declare the money a permanent budget cut. The Clinton administration wants Medicare savings, too, but would use the money to finance the administration's new health-care plan.

"This is a fundamental disagreement between those who think the budget is cut to the bone and those who think we haven't solved the problem," says the sponsor of the measure, Rep. Timothy Penny, D-Minn.

Deputy budget director Alice Rivlin dismissed Penny's plan as "counterproductive" to economic growth and prosperity in testimony before the House Budget Committee last week.

For economic recovery, free trade and high-tech industrial promotion to work, she contended, the administration can't take more cuts in job training, education and public works.

Claiming Medicare cuts as savings, Rivlin added, might also make it impossible to finance - or even pass - Clinton's health-care reforms because new and likely less popular ways would have to be found to pay for it. And without health-care reform, she said, "ultimate control of the deficit is unattainable."

Penny and co-sponsor John Kasich, R-Ohio, say they are motivated by alarm that budget deficits are expected to rise again after 1996 unless more cuts are made. They'd also like to shift the burden of discretionary budget cuts, now heaviest on defense, to other areas, particularly social programs.

But those efforts are meeting fierce resistance from more liberal members of Congress, as well as the White House.

"The trouble is, easy savings are hard to come by," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, which specializes in analyzing the social effects of government budgets.

"The idea that there are readily identifiable, big inefficiencies in government simply isn't true," Greenstein added. "Most real savings nowadays entail reducing a service or benefit that's important to some people."

Achieving further deep cuts is made even more difficult because President Clinton last summer agreed to a plan that would trim federal spending by $433 billion over the next five years.

As an alternative to the Penny-Kasich plan, Clinton is offering a much smaller package of new savings, including $9 billion from major reforms in how the government buys goods and services and $2 billion in direct program cuts.

A House vote on the Penny-Kasich plan, co-sponsored by 23 others, is tentatively scheduled for Saturday. It would affect about 80 projects and programs.

"It's put-up-or-shut-up time," Kasich said. "This is it, up or down, one vote on the whole caboodle."

House Speaker Thomas Foley, D-Wash., has sharply criticized the Penny-Kasich proposal, charging that it counts as savings many of the cuts the president has already included in his five-year budget and could endanger his proposed health-care plan.

"I am concerned about taking the Medicare savings that are needed to finance health-care [reform] and assigning them to the deficit, then turning around next year and saying, `Well, we don't have any way to pay for health care.' "

In the Senate, a coalition led by Sens. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., and Hank Brown, R-Colo., has called for $109 billion in more cuts in 75 areas, many of them the same as those contained in the House proposal. A vote on the Senate version could also come late this week.

The big difference between the two is that the Penny-Kasich plan would force future spending caps down even further than required in Clinton's budget, thus denying the president the ability to plow some of the savings back into health-care reform and crime-fighting measures. The Kerrey-Brown plan, though demanding steep cutbacks in spending, would permit Clinton to recycle some of the savings into health-care reform.

However, the Senate plan also includes $27 billion in savings by eliminating federal jobs. Senators just voted overwhelmingly to use $23 billion of that money to pay for a new crime-fighting bill.

Indeed, critics complain that both the House and Senate versions engage in accounting sleight of hand that counts money the president has already cut in his budget.

By ordering a further lowering of spending caps, said Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the House proposal counts "tens of billions of dollars in savings already being counted on to reach the existing caps."