ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 1, 1996 TAG: 9610010046
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
THE TELEVISED Warner face-off Sunday night - incumbent Republican Sen. John vs. Democratic challenger Mark - was a modest improvement over the standard campaign fare of 30-second political ads. Which, of course, isn't saying much.
Even in the debate's relatively relaxed format, the candidates were disappointingly dependent on pat answers and set sound bites. And neither Democratic demagoguery on Medicare (as if the program's runaway costs had no bearing on the health of Medicare finances) nor Republican demagoguery on tax cuts (as if such proposals had no bearing on funds available for, say, Medicare) gets to a central if frequently overlooked fiscal point: As important as the level of government spending and taxation is what the money is spent on.
Either Warner might benefit, for example, from thinking about an article in the September issue of Governing magazine on the difficulties that governments face in concentrating resources on programs with big benefit-to-cost ratios.
One difficulty, wrote Robert D. Behn, director of the Governors Center at Duke University, is that the payback for such programs - prenatal care, say, or investment in new technology - is never instantaneous and often not until after the next election. A second difficulty, Behn said, is that the paybacks are harder to track than in the private sector, in part because the paybacks from one program (say, prenatal care) often show up as savings in another (in, say, public-health or school costs).
Neither side gives the point the respect it deserves.
If Mark Warner and the Democrats were to do so, they would, for example, tone down their Medicare rhetoric. Failure to contain Medicare costs is to invite ever-increasing commitment of public resources to a program with a low benefit-to-cost ratio.
If John Warner and the Republicans were to do so, they would, for example, tone down their anti-Internal Revenue Service rhetoric. The payback from IRS budget increases early in the Clinton administration - getting tax cheats to pay up - actually has come more quickly and more measurably than most: Several times more has been collected in legally owed taxes than has been spent on the enforcement boost.
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS CONGRESSby CNB