Budget Travesty

With the usual White House fanfare, President Reagan and Senate Republicans announced their grand budget compromise recently. Then the President’s chief of staff stamped the presidential seal on “the most ambitious budget-reduction plan in postwar history.”

In fact, it is a charade that avoids the really tough budget decisions and covers up the biggest budget travesty of all: a federal debt that by the end of the next fiscal year will have doubled during Reagan’s tenure in Washington to more than $2 trillion. This is the President who continues to preach about big spenders and the balanced-budget amendment.

What no one likes to say is that the fastest-growing budget item, faster even than defense, is interest on the federal debt.

The 1986 price tag for interest on the federal debt is $143 billion, up more than 100% since 1981. That, largely, is the legacy of a tax cut that heaped the biggest dollar benefits on the rich and paid the Pentagon’s way into the weapons supermarket. The compromise papers over the fact that the Pentagon still will get all of its weapons, including redundancies and ultimate cost overruns.

The brunt of the cuts still are borne by domestic programs. Some--like Amtrak, revenue sharing and, now, Social Security--have received a lot of attention. But there are other items that you don’t hear about: Indian education aid, energy conservation, sewage-treatment plants, highways, veterans’ health care and housing, soil and water conservation, youth employment and job training, compensatory education, national parks, health research and more.

Leafing through the budget, one wonders just what guidelines the White House budget-slashers followed, if any. There may be a legitimate debate to be had about the value of some of the domestic programs, but let’s at least have a debate.

Does not, for instance, the federal government still bear a responsibility for educating native American children? Should health research be turned over to private enterprise? What happens to some veterans when they go to VA hospitals and are turned away? Can we afford to be smug about energy supplies? What are we doing about crumbling bridges and highways?

For that matter, why can’t corporations pay higher taxes? During a period of economic expansion and tremendous tax incentives for business, corporate income taxes amount to only $66 billion, a $5-billion increase since 1981.

The American people seem to admire the President when he stands fast. Then they admire him when he is willing to compromise. We’d like to admire him for having a true national discourse on what the 1986 budget really would do.