Eye-to-Eye With Gophers

President Reagan has frittered away precious time peddling a watered-down tax-reform plan that should have been spent taking charge of serious efforts to cut the federal budget deficit down to size.

If he keeps it up, he must be prepared to watch what is left of his Reagan Revolution wiped out by a wave of debt that is building at historic rates.

Reagan has got much of what he wants as President not so much with leadership as with good-natured obstinacy on generally popular issues.

He wanted tax cuts. So did most Americans. He thought that government supported the un-deserving poor too lavishly. That struck a responsive chord with many taxpayers. He wanted more defense. In a general way, so did most Americans.

Being stubborn got him tax cuts and budget cuts. It will not get smaller deficits. That will take leadership based on a realization that the nation’s economy is not growing fast enough to make the deficits go away and that tax increases will be far less damaging than uncontrolled federal debt.

In short order, the U.S. national debt will be $2 trillion--nearly three times what the government earns in taxes in a year, half the value of everything that Americans produce in a year.

Some social programs have been cut to the marrow, and cannot be held at present levels without someone’s suffering. Some further reductions still are possible and desirable, as in pensions for federal employees that are grossly out of line with the money on which an average American in private business can expect to retire. But the reductions in defense spending, Medicare, aid to children and other programs have gone as far as the country can stand to have them go. Yet, with all the cutting, the national debt grows by half a billion dollars every day.

The United States will pay more in interest on its debt this year than it paid for defense five years ago. But that is not the only penalty for running the world’s richest government on credit.

It creates a sort of fiscal Bermuda Triangle into which the world’s economy may well simply vanish if Reagan does not abandon his good-natured stubbornness and work seriously with Congress on a mix of budget cuts and tax increases that will make dents in the deficit that mean something.

The deficit helps keep the value of the dollar artificially high, making it impossible not only for American manufacturers but also American farmers to compete in world markets. The flood of imports from countries whose goods are cheap because their money is cheap has cost 2.5 million American manufacturing jobs since 1980, creating intense pressures for trade barriers. High American interest rates draw tens of billions of dollars in foreign capital to this country, money that could and should be invested at home to strengthen economies that now grow largely because of exports to the United States. Because Americans are buying far more than they sell in the global market, the Federal Reserve Board must increase the money supply faster than it wants to just to keep the economy moving. Most economists say that it is safe to do that for now, but that if it goes on too long it will mean inflation down the road.

In these circumstances a leader should be out front in a search for ways to make drastic reductions in the deficit. Instead, Reagan has been on the road whipping up support among people whom he insists on calling “populists” for a tax plan that would add somewhere between $14 billion and $20 billion to the deficit each year.

To assert itself in a world no longer entirely of its own choosing, the United States needs endurance above all. It cannot endure on the road that Reagan insists on following. It cannot keep going more deeply into debt and still cope with terrorism, hold together the Atlantic Alliance, stay no worse than even with the Soviet Union, help Third World countries that are themselves deeply in debt and keep its own economy climbing into the future.

The President puts great stock in standing tall. But when you stand tall in the sort of financial hole that he has dug for the country you are likely to be eye-to-eye with nothing but gophers--a ridiculous position from which to exert leadership.

Congress understands that it has to come to some form of tax increases as a last resort in Washington’s effort to build endurance into its economy. The role of leadership into which Americans have put Reagan requires that he understand it as well.