August 9, 1995
"The Impossible Dream of a Balanced Budget"
San Jose Mercury News
By Timothy Taylor
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AS CONGRESS heads into its summer recess, it leaves behind only three reasons to be skeptical about whether all the hullabaloo over slashing the budget deficit will actually amount to anything. The three are: past experience, current events and future prospects.

Sure, both President Clinton and the congressional Republicans have endorsed the goal of an eventually balanced budget; the main difference on the surface is that Clinton is proposing a nine- or 10-year timetable, while the Republicans say they can do it in seven.

But both of those timelines are several election cycles in the future, comfortably into the next millennium. Back in 1986, lest we forget, a president and Congress of opposing parties agreed on the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill to guarantee a balanced budget in five years, by 1991. A revised version of the bill, passed in 1988, called for a balanced budget by 1993.

When the 1993 budget deficit came in at $254 billion, we missed even the revised target by just a tad. It is more than a little ironic to see Phil Gramm running for president as a person who can fix the deficit. Shouldn't he be held to account for the failure of his namesake bill?

There is little reason to believe that this year's deficit-cutting fervor will be substantially more effective than was Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. Washington budgetmeisters are predicting a ''train wreck'' in October. The Clinton administration is planning to veto everything, and to allow the government to shut down rather than accept the Republican budget plans.

One main reason for this is that while the Republicans have been very disciplined in sticking to their spending targets, they have been utterly without restraint in handing out goodies to business interests by adding legislative riders to the budget bills.

My favorite example, just because it's so trivial, is a Wall Street Journal report that senators from Kentucky have ''amended a Treasury Department bill to give the liquor industry a waiver on labeling rules affecting imports of flavored alcoholic beverages.''

Adding up all the proposed Republican changes in regulations affecting product labeling, the environment, labor, affirmative action, abortion, health and safety, and more, I suspect that Clinton would be threatening to veto the Republican budget even if it contained no spending cuts at all. Add in the fact that the Republicans have thoughtfully targeted Clinton's pet programs for especially deep cuts, and a veto is almost inevitable.

Sure, some sort of budget will eventually be worked out; even if the federal government shuts down for a few days, it won't be closed forever.

But remember that this year, in all logic, should be the one for taking the easy agreed-upon spending cuts - for picking the low-hanging apples. Next year, and the year after that, and after that, the deficit-cutting will inevitably become harder and harder.

How seriously should one treat budget plans that reserve large spending cuts for after the elections of 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and even (considering the longer timetable of the Clinton plan) 2004? After all, it is nearly proverbial that a politician's horizon sees only as far as the next election.

Given that no Congress can dictate spending levels to a future Congress, it would be too kind to call such a timeline a ''plan.'' Maybe a hope, a wish, a daydream? In plainer English, a political timetable four or five election cycles in the future is just a polite way of saying ''maybe.''

In fact, the long-term Clinton plan for balancing the budget is heavily backloaded, so that most of the cuts would take place after 2000 - not even during a second Clinton term of office. In other words, Clinton is fully in support of the next president making hard budgetary choices.

This time is now as ripe as it will ever be to make a real dent in the budget deficit. It's not an election year, which means the political infighting is actually less severe than it will be next year. Moreover, the deficit has been falling on its own accord the last few years; the 1995 figure will be a lower-than-expected $160 billion.

This recent decline in the deficit was predictable. As I described four years ago in this column, the budget deficit was almost certain to decline in the first half of the 1990s as the economy climbed out of recession, as the savings and loan bailout drew to a close, and as the annual surpluses in the Social Security trust fund continue to rise. But now is the time to rethink federal tax and spending in a way that builds on this natural momentum.

At least since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, American voters have strongly supported candidates who promised to balance the budget in the hazy intermediate future. But when push comes to shove, most politicians clearly do not yet feel that they were elected to take definitive steps toward balancing the budget in the here and now.

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