ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
WHILE the Republicans have been convening this week in San Diego, nominating Bob Dole and getting ready to cheer his acceptance speech last night, the 1.4 million members of the Reform Party have been selecting a candidate - via mail, phone and Internet voting. The winner, probably Ross Perot but perhaps former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, is to be announced Sunday when party members gather in Valley Forge, Pa.
The party is worth paying attention to. If not for the novelty of its nominating method, then for the fact that Perot four years ago got 19 percent of the vote, and beat out the Democrats for second place in Utah and the Republicans for second place in Maine. And if not for the eccentric Perot's showing four years ago, then for the party's credibility on federal budget-balancing.
The Reform Party is right in insisting that budget-balancing requires both reform of middle-class entitlements (to which Democrats, particularly, are resistant) and avoidance of election-year tax-cut gimmicks (to which Republicans, particularly, are prone). Here's why:
Though federal bureaucracy and budgetary bloat are synonymous in the minds of many Americans, one of the major underreported stories these days is how much federal operations have been shrinking. Even before Republicans took over Congress at the beginning of last year, civilian federal employment was declining under the government-reinvention effort of the Clinton administration. That initiative has now cut the equivalent of 245,000 full-time jobs from the federal civilian payroll, and federal employment is less than 2 million for the first time in three decades.
The general trend predates Clinton. As John H. Makin and Norman J. Ornstein point out in their 1994 book, "Debt and Taxes," discretionary federal spending - that is, government operations, including both military and domestic - has shrunk steadily as a percentage of the gross domestic product, to about 8 percent, since peaking at 14 percent in the late '60s.
But overall federal spending has continued to rise. (Actually, even overall spending is now declining relative to the size of the economy, but only since 1992-93 and only slightly.) That's because nonoperational items - transfer payments to individuals, such as Social Security, Medicare and debt-service payouts - have increased faster, from less than 6 percent to more than 12 percent of the U.S. economy over the past 30 years, than operational expenditures have declined.
In short, the big bucks now are in places where spending cuts can be hazardous to political health. Reforming middle-class entitlements is politically difficult but necessary. Major tax-cutting will make it more difficult but no less necessary.
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB