Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 8, 1990 TAG: 9005080669
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: R.W. APPLE JR. THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
But no one wants to take the responsibility for doing the deed. In the politics of placation that prevails in the capital these days, with officeholders determined to conform to the wishes of the electorate, it is considered political poison to advocate higher taxes.
That's what the opinion polls seem to counsel; that's what politicians deduced from the defeat of Walter Mondale, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984, after he discussed a tax increase.
Hence Bush's unvarying refrain, in the 1988 campaign and ever since: "Read my lips: no new taxes." Hence the Democrats' far-less catchy but equally determined resolve: Never again will we give you Republicans an opening to attack us as the party that taxes and taxes, spends and spends.
Now Bush has agreed to listen to talk about higher taxes, if not to join in, and the Democrats are looking for a way to take part in that conversation without winding up as the ones who always have to raise the subject.
Both sides, in other words, are more preoccupied with covering themselves politically than with solving the fiscal problem. Both would probably settle for a no-fault tax increase, if such a thing could be devised in the dead of night.
Complicating the political calculus even more is the Chicken Little problem. Every spring, people say that if some serious work isn't done on the deficit the sky will fall. But it hasn't yet, and that reduces the pressure to act.
The president was driven to initiate negotiations by the growing deficit, which includes a political threat almost as severe as that posed by seeming to renege on his promise to hold the line on taxes.
Instead of needing a deficit reduction of $36 billion to meet Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget targets for the fiscal year that begins this Oct. 1, as originally calculated, the White House and Congress may have to come up with $45 billion, according to Richard Darman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Some Democratic leaders think the figure could be as high as $60 billion.
Bush would shrug off that problem at his peril, not only because of the Gramm-Rudman constraints but also because of the effect of deficits on interest rates. Sustained high interest rates, some presidential political strategists believe, could topple the economy into recession just as Bush is mounting his re-election drive in 1992.
"That frightens me more than anything else I see on the horizon," one White House planner said Monday.
But how do you square a tax increase with the campaign pledge - indeed, the whole political ethos - that George Bush has projected to the nation?
Rep. Bill Frenzel of Minnesota, the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, suggested one ploy Monday afternoon: Things change, he said.
"There isn't any president who hasn't tried to make good on his promises," said Frenzel, who is retiring at the end of this term and can state his views in these matters with more candor than some. "There's no president who hasn't lived through times that change, and maybe outdate some promises."
But most Republicans are wary of that idea. Far better, several White House tacticians have been saying in recent days, to try to raise more money through something that could be credibly labeled a "user fee" rather than a tax, defining the problem out of existence in order to avoid a political pitfall.
Doing that might run into trouble because of the definition supplied by Darman when asked at his confirmation hearing to explain what was a tax and what was not: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."
The Democrats have developed sharp eyes for webbed feet.
by CNB