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

DATE: FRIDAY, January 13, 1995                   TAG: 9501130084
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SPENDING

Logrolling certainly exists. But as a theory to explain deficits and government spending, there's a problem: historical reality.

For one thing, it takes fancy footwork for the public-choice people to explain why, as a general proposition, the United States didn't start running huge peacetime deficits until recently. Surely logrolling and pork have been around a lot longer than that.

More specifically, say American Enterprise Institute economist John H. Makin and political scientist Norman J. Ornstein in their 1994 book, "Debt and Taxes," recent deficits are in part an unintended consequence of reforms that have sharply restricted logrolling.

Using multiyear entitlements rather than year-to-year appropriations for the spending that now engulfs the federal budget, they observe, removes rather than adds to the politics of it. In the early '70s, legislators deliberately ended their control over, say, Social Security benefits, by enacting automatic cost-of-living increases.

Before, a politician might have won credits from the voters for favoring an increase in Social Security benefits. Now, no politician gets pork credit for cost-of-living increases in Social Security benefits, because the voters back home know they're entitled to them anyway. Ditto Medicare, veterans' pensions and similar entitlement spending.

Indeed, the only thing that can happen politically with entitlement spending is bad: You're blamed if you vote (or threaten) not to let it carry on as before.

So entitlement spending - the kind that's immune from logrolling - has continued to grow, while the legislative budget-cutting is done in the ever-shrinking part of the budget over which lawmakers have more direct control.