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

DATE: SATURDAY, February 11, 1995                   TAG: 9502130017
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RETREATING FROM DEFICIT REDUCTION

For that, a budget-cutting President Clinton deserves considerable credit. Instead, he was roundly repudiated in midterm congressional elections.

Which helps to explain why his modest budget plan for 1996, unveiled this week, not only abandons his hopes of revamping America's health-care system and greatly expanding retraining efforts for workers caught in a hyper-changing economy. It also steps back from Clinton's earlier focus on deficit reduction, exchanging it for tax cuts for the middle class.

To be sure, his budget proposal would suppress the deficit to 2.1 percent of the nation's gross domestic product by the end of the decade. Ordinarily, that's a sustainable figure, because you can reasonably assume that annual growth in the economy will on average be at least 2.1 percent. Moreover, eliminating 130 small programs and consolidating 270 others is an achievement in itself.

But for the late '90s, that 2.1 percent isn't low enough. The problem: Largely left alone in Clinton's proposals are the budget-busters that, if untouched, are projected to send the deficit soaring again at the start of the next century.

Remember when, as part of his clumsy health-care reform effort last year, Clinton proposed big cuts in Medicare? This year, it's off the table.

Now the budget goes to Congress, which has emitted far more talk about, than evidence of, its enthusiasm for debt reduction. Clinton's critics, who voted against his deficit-cutting budget plans, are making passionate speeches about "tough choices." But their preference is the balanced-budget amendment, which in effect is no choice. It would push onto future lawmakers the actual decisions for cutting the deficit.

Meantime, the same congressmen are pledging to cut tax revenues, increase defense spending and exempt Social Security from any spending cuts. The snake oil has a familiar smell.

Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, sums up the situation well. If you combine defense spending and interest on the federal debt with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military and civil-service retirement benefits and other mandated spending and "entitlements," he notes in an analysis of Clinton's budget plan, you've accounted for 83 percent of the budget.

Everything else - national parks, FBI, education, war on drugs, environmental cleanup; everything, in fact, that would be subject to a line-item veto - makes up only 17 percent of the federal budget.

Sorry, but you can eliminate arts funding, public broadcasting and the entirety of welfare, and still come nowhere close to balancing the budget. The mandated spending must also be brought under control if accumulated federal debt is to be kept from crowding out too much of the economy.

Clinton's retreat, if understandable, is disappointing. Republicans controlling Congress should ponder their own hypocrisy in attacking big government while failing to come to terms with entitlement spending.

And citizens, who have sent mixed signals about their tolerance of federal debt, ought to recall the results of Clinton's two-year attention to deficit reduction. These included lower interest rates, a stronger recovery and growing confidence in the economy.