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

DATE: THURSDAY, February 7, 1991                   TAG: 9102070437
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE BUSH BUDGET: AN IMPROVEMENT

It offers numerous minor tradeoffs: slight spending increases here, cutbacks there. Its biggest spending boost is for the space program, an odd priority.

By one analysis, it cuts programs for the poor by about $760 million, a disgraceful measure amid a deepening recession, though not without precedent after a decade of cutbacks.

Bush's spending plan foolishly proposes puffed-up Star Wars funding and, once again, his pet capital-gains tax cut. Congress can dispose of these.

In two ways, though, the budget is an improvement over past efforts.

First, it is on the whole a relatively honest plan. Under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, which required budgets to meet deficit-reduction targets, the Bush administration last year projected a $100 billion deficit for 1991. It topped $300 billion.

Now the budget process has been altered. The government is required only to restrain legislative initiatives that would increase the deficit. If budgetmakers increase spending somewhere, they have to find offsetting savings or revenues to pay for it.

But they don't have to pretend to reduce the total deficit compared to last year's, given that much of it is driven by external, temporary factors such as war, recession and the savings-and-loan bailout.

In this new, more realistic environment, the Bush budget projection of a $280 billion deficit for next year is far less fanciful than last year's estimate.

The other good thing about the spending plan is that it contains provisions likely to provoke debate about entitlements. These now are given without regard to a person's income.

The budget seeks to increase Medicare premiums for beneficiaries with incomes of $125,000 or more. It would cut off farm-support for producers with more than $125,000 of non-farm income. It would concentrate more college aid for needy students.

Granted, the resulting savings are small; Congress may refuse to enact the provisions anyway. Granted, too, the measures are meant to score political points - in particular, to blunt a Democratic campaign portraying Republicans as coddlers of the rich.

Even so, it's time the nation began looking at reining in automatic benefits for the well-off. The deficit has resisted taming partly because entitlement spending has been sacrosanct, and is growing fast.

Entitlements now account for more than half the budget. Leaving the military aside, only 7 percent of the budget is left for all other federal programs.

Overdue at least for an airing and initial exercise is the principle that not everyone is entitled to entitlements.

Overall, Bush's budget tinkers. It continues to leave in the background a mountain of domestic problems ranging from inadequate, uneven education and a rotting infrastructure to an urban epidemic of drugs and violence.

Halfway through Bush's four-year term, this budget shows no signs of "the education president" or the "environmental president" emerging. It evinces a "gentler, kinder nation," but only in comparison with the previous decade.