Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 16, 1990 TAG: 9007160169
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
With Bush retreating from his promise never to raise taxes, Republicans counting on that pledge to help re-elect them have expressed shock and dismay. There's been talk of betrayal and pretense that they believed in the pledge - all nonsense. The promise, like much of the Bush campaign, was never more than pandering, a fact evident to all who can do simple sums.
In 10 Reagan-Bush years, interest costs on the national debt quadrupled - to almost $200 billion a year. The GOP doctrine was that cutting spending rather than raising revenues was the answer to chronic deficits. But the reality, as explained by House Minority Leader Robert Michel, R-Ill., is quite different.
"You know," Michel said recently, "we didn't have a vote on the president's budget in the House because it had a freeze on COLAs [cost-of-living adjustments for federal retirees] and half our members didn't want to do a freeze on COLAs. When I see that in my own party, I have to ask my own members: How much guts do you guys have to have to attack the expenditure side?"
One also has to ask why it was that Reagan and Bush themselves never went to war against spending. They talked, of course, about the savings they would make with the line-item veto, a weapon they didn't have and weren't likely to get. Reagan once promised, then declined, to make public a list of cuts he would have made had he had the veto.
Another dodge was high-flown rhetoric urging a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget. None of the talk got down to cases; consequently, deficits and debt grew to the point of threatening to tip the economy into recession.
This is the kind of threat that concentrates the minds of politicians. Thus it was that George Bush gave up his hope of getting the Democrats to broach the possibility of new taxes, and did so himself in a statement that, being written, did not require him to move his lips.
What follows no one knows. "For the last 10 years," as Walter Mondale observes, "we've had a fiscal politics of evasion. Nobody - Democrat or Republican - has wanted to deal with these issues. The Republicans haven't wanted to give up a good campaign slogan. The Democrats have been terrorized by my landslide defeat in 1984. Ever since, there has been a bipartisan evasion of the deficit issue, because it requires facing up to new taxes. . . . Our leaders conclude that if they talk at any length or in any detail about important issues, they're in trouble."
The Bush flip-flop on taxes has changed none of the fundamental points in Mondale's cogent analysis. The search at the budget summit remains one for partisan advantage, and the score is being kept in those terms. Between the administration and Congress, between the two parties, and between the parties and the general public, there is an absence of trust regarding the nation's most fundamental problem.
Many citizens would willingly pay more taxes to reduce the debt-and-deficit plague, but have no confidence that additional revenues would be so applied. Many wonder as well about the destination of billions of new dollars created each year by existing taxes. And then there is the near-paralyzing effect created by emergence of the stunning dimensions of the savings-and-loan fiasco, a joint production of two political parties ever needful of big bucks from special interests to foot the bill for campaigns increasingly characterized by savage personal attacks.
Both Reagan and Bush kept rows of Uncle Sam suits in their closets. Both loved to talk about "American values" as they rolled to victory over the remains of the Democratic Party. But the nation has yet to see George Bush fully engaged with a domestic problem or, for that matter, asking the public to pay attention.
After weeks of haggling, the big news from the budget summit is that the president, regarding new tax revenues, had conceded the obvious. Which, of course, is the beginning and not the end of a negotiation.
Watching the snail's pace of deficit talks and the president's obvious fascination with foreign affairs, one can be driven to wonder if it is not time to unleash Dan Quayle on something or other.
by CNB