THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505190014
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
With congressional majorities committed to a balanced budget, the nation has a one-time opportunity to elevate its politics as well as restore fiscal sanity. But the president will have to help and, until now, has shown no signs of doing so.
On the Republican side, constructive party discipline, initiative and risk-taking have re-emerged. The GOP has matched years of bluster about balancing the budget with a concrete scheme to achieve the goal over seven years. Scores of constituencies - including Republican constituencies - face reduction of benefits. The wall around entitlement programs like Medicare, long regarded as untouchable, has been breeched with a move to slow mandated cost increases.
Republicans have not gone against their urge to comfort the comfortable: There's zealotry in their demand that the better-off enjoy a tax increase while the poor are instructed to pull harder on their bootstraps. But the boldness and scope of their budget proposals considerably exceed what most Americans have expected from either of the major parties. Their effort deserves to be rewarded.
If it is, there should be a resurgence of national confidence in the political system and a strengthening of the economy; if not, the wasting addiction to debt and a politics of delusion will continue. The delusion - that deficits don't matter - has cost us about a trillion dollars in new debt for each presidential term since 1980. The current deficit of $200 billion a year is roughly the amount required just to pay interest, and an amount forever lost to health care, education, infrastructure and crime control.
A tax increase was required to get the deficit that ``low,'' and without another or sizable spending cuts, it will soon rise sharply, shifting even more of this generation's responsibilities onto the shoulders of succeeding ones. We've run out of faked revenue forecasts and other rosy scenarios that encouraged Americans to believe they were entitled to free lunches so long as they castigated the politics that provided them.
The reward President Clinton owes the Republicans is an honest response. They are not getting it. Busily stroking various elements of the Democratic coalition he needs (plus some) for re-election, Clinton presents himself as the loving protector of the welfare state. He resorts quickly to fearmongering, just as he did in undermining his opponents for the Democratic nomination.
True, the Republicans stonewalled his efforts to reduce the deficit and preached doom for an economy that later grew so fast it had to be haltered. And true as well, Newt Gingrich and Co. savaged their own George Bush when he was forced - at long last - to react to towering deficits. But to cite this is to defend the status quo and to avoid the challenge posed by a ruinous debt.
The president is right, of course, to attack the Republican tax cut, but he ought to drop his own. For every GOP spending reduction he finds too harsh, he should offer a substitute. Above all, with bands playing, he should get aboard what may be the last train out of a fiscal irresponsibility that has diminished the nation and harshly eroded citizen confidence in representative government.
It is not too much to say that the president is in arrears in terms of vision and leadership, and has not enjoyed much esteem. The easy road to popularity is to picture Republican spending reductions as the product of uncaring greed; that tactic might even get him re-elected - without distinction - to another term of stalemate and another round of gridlock. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB