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

DATE: TUESDAY, September 28, 1993                   TAG: 9309290336
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ROBERT RENO
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BRUTAL SPECIFICS

A NEW PLAN to eliminate the federal deficit by the year 2000 has been unveiled. This one's offered by the Concord Coalition, founded by former Sens. Warren Rudman and Paul Tsongas to make noise about the lunacy of federal fiscal policies.

This latest plan is compelling reading because Rudman's conservative Republican credentials are impeccable and he is not running for office. Most Republicans are salivating at the prospect of campaigning in 1994, clobbering the Democrats about tax increases and pretending that the budget can be balanced without higher taxes, without touching Medicare or Social Security, by simply butchering the bureaucracy and by eliminating wasteful domestic spending.

The new plan advanced by Rudman says, in effect, that this is hogwash.

It relies partly on the usual suspects in deficit reduction, piddling things like ending subsidies for beekeepers and goat farmers and abolishing the Appalachian Commission, even canceling the space station and the superconducting supercollider, two costly projects so dear to putative anti-spenders like Gramm. It would do all these things. But when you've cut the budget clean of this suet, get a load of what else it would take to balance it.

Rudman and Tsongas want, among other things, a 50-cent increase in the gasoline tax, severe limitation on the deductibility of mortgage interest for better-off homeowners, higher sin taxes, an increase in the Social Security retirement age to 68, and big hits on Social Security and Medicare recipients earning more than $42,000 a year.

It's a recipe for the political suicide of the party that embraces it. It makes President Clinton's budget-reduction plan, which passed the Senate this summer by the narrowest of margins, look timid. It provides the sort of brutal specifics that people like Ross Perot coyly avoid with wallowing generalities, Democrats by hiding under rocks and Republicans by chanting their nursery rhyme of ``tax and spend and blah, blah, blah.''

This particular plan, though credible in its arithmetic, has very little chance of passage. But since the debate over how to eliminate the deficit is probably going to go on for the remainder of most of our lifetimes, it is useful as a guide to some of the rubbish we're being fed.

\ Robert Reno writes for Newsday.

L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service

by CNB