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Rejection of budget proposal is misleading As the Oct. 1 opening of the federal fiscal year approaches, Congress and the president, when controlled by opposing parties, typically engage in a debate about the final size of the federal budget. Sometimes this leads to tense standoffs, but more often than not members of Congress know they institutionally are at political disadvantage and just want to cut a fair deal with the White House and go home. This year congressional Republicans have offered a generous compromise to Bill Clinton, but their reward is a shameless White House-Gore campaign effort to paint the offer as "reckless." The 2001 budget surplus is projected to reach a staggering $268 billion. That's taxpayers' money, flowing into the Treasury so fast that even Congress and the president haven't figured out how to spend it. So the GOP proposes to dedicate 90 percent of next year's surplus to paying down the national debt, and then splitting the remaining 10 percent between new spending and modest tax cuts. Keep in mind that the proposed GOP budget would spend far more than the "budget caps" agreed to back in 1997 for the 2001 fiscal year. Discretionary spending would go up by 7 percent, at a time when inflation is between 2 percent and 3 percent. But the Gore-Clinton team fears that someone, somewhere, will get to keep a few bucks more of what they have earned instead of sending it to Washington. And so the GOP offer is DOA. Within the next several days Congress and the White House will come to an accommodation. Congress has no appetite for a budget battle in an election year, so we should expect a lot more spending and very little debt reduction in order to avoid a Clinton veto. Thus the Clinton-Gore team ends its eight years of fiscal politics just as it began, by bargaining in bad faith with Congress. There's no good reason, other than misleading political positioning, for the White House to reject GOP congressional leaders' budget proposal. The American people deserve better |
