Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030084
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They certainly don't matter.
They don't, anyway, if what Congress has been up to is any indication.
I know, I know. It's hard to follow national news in the face of all those fascinating local political commercials filling the air.
I still don't think we should let pass, without some notice, the stomping Washington is preparing to administer to the most vulnerable members of our society.
Newt Gingrich calls himself a revolutionary. He wants to destroy the "failed welfare state." He wants to return our country to the "pre-New Deal model that, before 1933, made America the most decentralized and least governmental society in the world."
To which I say, Right on. The welfare state is failed. We certainly do need less government and more decentralization, fewer bureaucrats and more entrepreneurs.
My problem is that I don't see in the congressmen's budget plans such a thoroughgoing revolution.
They're not dismantling the welfare state. They're not repealing the New Deal.
If they were, amid the revolutionary guard's brave talk, some mention of cutting Social Security might have been heard.
Their budget plans might have included more serious reduction of government benefits to the middle and wealthy classes.
(They might have proposed, for instance, capping mortgage-interest deductions at $300,000. That would have affected only 5 percent of homeowners while reducing the deficit by $21 billion over five years.)
Republicans might have heeded calls by members of their own party to really go after corporate welfare - $86 billion identified as such by the Cato Institute this year alone. (We do believe in the free market, don't we?)
They might have gone after Pentagon pork barrel, too, instead of increasing the military budget $6.9 billion beyond the Clinton administration's already excessive request.
No, these radicals in expensive suits have proved a tentative and selective vanguard. They have singled out for serious slashing the parts of the government-welfare edifice aimed at benefiting a specific category of people.
People who don't hire legions of lobbyists or deliver fat gifts to campaign coffers. People whose political voice in America has always been marginalized; who, amid economic and social anxiety, make easy scapegoats. People less likely to vote Republican.
Poor people.
Leaving aside the trashing of a 60-year-old commitment to provide a safety net for the impoverished, consider what the budget plans would do just to the earned-income tax credit.
Described by Ronald Reagan as "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job-creation measure to come out of Congress," this refundable credit uses the tax system to help make work more rewarding than welfare for struggling families.
A good idea, you would think, when trying to move people from welfare rolls into jobs. Yet Congress is proposing to cut the program by as much as $43 billion over seven years. Only 4 percent of these savings, according to the Republicans' own Joint Committee on Taxation, would result from curbing errors and fraud. The rest would amount, in effect, to a tax increase on the working poor.
And not only that: a tax increase to help offset tax cuts for the well-off.
I'm sorry, but that is reprehensible.
It also is illustrative of the budget plans' overall thrust. According to the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, 50 percent of the spending cuts in reconciliation bills passed last month would fall on the bottom fifth, income-wise, of American workers. Twenty-two percent would be visited on the second-to-bottom fifth.
The upper two-fifths in income would get hit with a combined total of 16 percent of the spending cuts. To help ease the blow, they'll get nice tax breaks.
The irony here is as plain as it is ugly. Fact is, the deficit attacked by these budget plans is the product of government transfer payments far more to the middle classes than to the shiftless and the destitute.
If Gingrich and his followers were as radical as they claim to be, that would be one thing. We all need some weaning from Washington. The country does need, and is slouching toward, a new paradigm of politics.
These budget plans, however, aren't ultimately about less government. They exude the odor of old paradigms: Reward your constituents, sock it to the powerless.
I'll grant the Republicans are showing some guts on Medicare, certainly a politically sensitive entitlement. But they couldn't avoid that if they hoped to balance the budget while offering $245 billion worth of tax cuts. They're going about the cutting the wrong way: without significant means testing or comprehensive health-care reform.
And notice how the Medicare cuts have attracted more attention, especially from demagogic Democrats, than far more severe cuts proposed for Medicaid.
No mystery there. Medicaid is for people who don't matter.
by CNB