Reagan Budget: Fire and Ice

There is nothing secret about President Reagan’s agenda. For him, hacking the “bloated federal government” down to size by getting rid of programs that should not have been created in the first place has always been more than rhetoric.

So it is no surprise that Reagan’s 1986 federal budget attempts to maintain the defense buildup by decimating domestic spending in some 50 areas. Back in Lyndon Johnson’s day, the budget fight was over guns and butter. With Reagan, it’s fire and ice. The nation’s military soars along on a rocket blast of new spending. Domestic programs get the deep freeze, or the deep six.

Superficially, the budget calls for a freeze of sorts with total spending of $974 billion, about the same as this year’s. But after Page 9 of the budget, a very different story emerges. Defense spending is up just about $30 billion. Domestic spending is down by more than $30 billion.

But that is not an even swap because Reagan has ruled out any tax increase; has no choice but to budget the full interest on the debt ($170 billion); has put Social Security cost-of-living increases off limits; and refuses to budge any further on the defense buildup.

That means taking nearly $40 billion in savings from a $400-billion chunk of the budget, roughly a 10% real spending cut in those programs.

Many of these programs deserve some paring or surgery, even after Reagan’s earlier trimmings. Some, including a number of farm subsidy programs, are counterproductive. Only the growls of guard-dog lobbyists keep other subsidies alive.

But in this budget, the Administration has gone after a number of worthy programs with the meat ax and a special 155-page book full of assaults and horror stories that John H. Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, likens to “a mugger going after a little old lady in the park.”

In proposing elimination of Urban Development Action Grants, the Administration decries the program as a “shell game” in which rich and powerful cities snatch funds from more deserving areas. The book singles out Los Angeles as one that has unfairly benefited from such grants. The Reagan solution is not to correct disparities, if they exist, but to wipe out the program altogether.

Another approach is to charge citizens more for the use of federal facilities and services--from loan fees for Federal Housing Administration mortgages to barge fees on the locks of the Mississippi River; from federal health inspections of supermarket meats to higher entrance and camping fees in the national parks and forests.

Some commercial users should pay higher fees, but it is unseemly for the Administration to complain that the entrance fee to Yellowstone Park has been frozen by Congress while admittance to Disneyland and Cypress Gardens has doubled. As the budget declares, $2 a car to enter Yellowstone is a bargain. It should be. Yellowstone is not Disneyland.

This is a mean-spirited and impolitic view toward one part of government by an Administration that is too intolerant of talk about touching its trillion-dollar defense buildup and too impatient to examine domestic programs on their merits.

Despite all this, the budget still falls $44 billion short of Reagan’s own 1988 deficit-reduction goal. It is a program that insists that a tax increase would be a drag on the economy but slides over the debilitating effect of massive deficits.

The President’s spending outline is just the first step in a long, complex budget process. Some of the domestic cuts should get serious consideration in spite of their contentious packaging. But Senate Republican leaders can and should impose on the White House an alternative that spreads the pain of budget cuts more evenly and achieves a much larger reduction in the deficit.