THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9504010002
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Regarding depiction of Republicans as meanies taking food out of the mouths of schoolchildren, Newt Gingrich has reason to squawk about ``despicable demagoguery.'' There's a lot of that going around, but the House speaker himself hasn't the cleanest of hands. With far more bombast than logic, he continues to push for cutting taxes before controlling deficits.
Only one-sixth of the public agrees with this priority, polls indicate, and there's deep division within the Republican Party about both the wisdom of reducing revenues and the fairness of the Gingrich scheme for doing so.
Almost half of House Republicans have gone on record in favor of limiting the $500-per-dependent child-care credit to families making $95,000 rather than the $200,000 ceiling Gingrich wants. They did so on the very day the speaker published a piece that: (1) called the tax cut ``the crowning jewel in the Contract With America''; (2) asked opponents ``to announce which of the 52 million children covered under our plan is not worth that $500 credit.''
This is a sorry sort of behavior - to have the speaker of the House grossly misstate the nature of an issue. The issue is not about the relative worth of children but about solvency: How does the world's largest debtor nation justify borrowing money to give tax relief? Gingrich offers this answer: ``The American government's money does not belong to the American government. That money belongs to Americans, and it's time to give Americans some of their own money back.''
This sort of gabble gives pandering a good name. The government, someone should shout, has no money to refund. For years it has been spending a dollar in benefits for every 75 cents it has taken in. The resulting debt is about $5 trillion - giving foreign lenders troubling leverage over U.S. economic policies.
The give-back Gingrich talks about was given upfront and is gone with the wind - except what is still being paid in welfare (often disguised as subsidies and tax breaks) from one end of the economic spectrum to the other. His talk of tax cuts would make far more sense if Republicans were guilty of gutting spending programs; regardless of merit, there would be money to offset the loss from reduced taxes.
We all remember how the Republicans - with some justice - said it was Democratic spending rather than Reagan tax cuts that caused the national debt to soar. But now that Republicans have control of the purse, Gingrich wants to play Santa. When one has one's own constituencies to consider, fiscal discipline is drudgery, especially to a man hailed as a revolutionary figure.
Yes, it's too early to weigh his actions: Republican congressional rule has barely begun, but Gingrich means his utterances to be taken as policy, and these it is fair to judge. There really is no difference between excessive spending and reckless tax reduction. Both are payoffs; both put Americans further in the hole. Hidden in the clouds of his own rhetoric, Gingrich is giving priority to a transfer of wealth tilted toward better-off Americans.
The House votes on the ``crowning-jewel'' tax cut next week. Many conservative Democrats who voted for the Reagan tax cut want no part of this one. Rep. Charles Stenholm, Democrat of Texas, says the Republicans he often sides with chose a ``ridiculous game plan'' in promising both a balanced budget and billions of dollars in tax cuts. So they did, and it takes more than a little demagoguery to talk about ``crowning jewels'' and a flimflam in the same breath. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB