Reagan Offers Budget, Tells Congress to Show ‘Courage’ : He’d ‘Settle for Tie’ in Fiscal Fight

President Reagan today asked Congress to exhibit “political courage” and adopt a low-growth $973.7-billion budget for next year that would freeze, trim or eliminate scores of familiar domestic programs.

Unveiling a set of proposals that had become one of the capital’s worst-kept secrets, Reagan declared the budget battle to be formally joined.

But in a pitch to key members of Congress at the White House, he acknowledged widespread congressional reservations about his budget and joked that he would “settle for a tie.”

Much of the congressional criticism comes from the proposed $30-billion increase in defense spending at the same time domestic spending would be chopped nearly $40 billion.

The budget also recommends sharp reductions in mass transit, housing and student aid; an end to the revenue-sharing program that turns federal tax dollars back to state and local governments without strings; termination of the federal subsidy of the Amtrak rail-passenger system, and a 5% pay cut for all federal civilian workers.

The Reagan budget, which he portrayed as austere, would fail to meet his own earlier target of halving the federal deficit by 1988.

Reagan also placed any increase in taxes off limits in the search for ways to reduce the record $220-billion deficit projected for this year, saying a tax hike would “derail this tremendous engine of economic growth.”

The proposals keep him on a collision course with Capitol Hill, where leaders of both parties have said for weeks that cuts in popular programs, already slashed during Reagan’s first term, would be difficult to enact without accompanying spending restraint in defense programs.

Reagan, asked at the presentation about the House Democrats’ charge his budget was “dead,” said:

“I’ve just brought it back to life.”

But House Democratic leader Jim Wright of Texas, asked if Reagan would get his budget, replied, “Some variation thereof.”

Reagan repeated the phrase and added:

“It just depends upon how close we all come. Right now, I’d settle for a tie.”

And, pressed again on whether he would agree to defense cuts, he responded, “We’ll have to talk about that.”

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, called the budget “a fantasy . . . conceived in that land of never-ending deficits” and said that “a freeze on defense spending remains the absolute, the minimum requirement.”

Sen. Lawton Chiles of Florida, ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, called the budget “a wall without windows. It tells us what we’re up against, but affords no vision.”

Chiles released a Senate Democratic staff analysis of the budget proposal that challenges the President’s contention that his proposals would reduce the nation’s deficits in increments each year.

“Deficits remain high. The future stays clouded,” Chiles said.