An Easier Way on the Budget

Congress, desperate to demonstrate that it cares as deeply as anyone that the national debt is at $2 trillion and rising, reminds us of a graduate student in economics who once filled 240 pages with arcane language that added up to nothing more revealing than “supply equals demand.” Asked why he didn’t just write that, he explained that nobody gets a doctoral degree for stating the obvious. Congress obviously feels the same way about taking a simple pledge to balance the budget by a date certain.

Instead, it has tied itself in knots of debate--the Senate meeting on a Sunday for only the seventh time in American history--over budget-balancing language that even Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the Senate majority leader, admits he does not fully understand. There is an easier way.

President Reagan endorses the plan wholeheartedly. Obviously, he understands it, even if Dole does not. He knows that it would give him the power to take most of the reductions out of social spending--with a large part of the defense budget shielded from cuts because of the wording of the plan. He also understands how he could achieve balance entirely with budget cuts, with no contribution from tax increases.

The proposal would amend a bill that lifts the formal debt ceiling far enough above $2 trillion to let Washington borrow more money to keep paying its bills. Only Congress can raise the ceiling and time is short. As of Monday, Washington was writing checks on empty bank accounts.

Congress wants to avoid the appearance of blithely telling voters that it is about to agree to putting the federal government more than $2 trillion into debt, even though analysts have been able for months to predict almost the exact second at which the ceiling would be broached.

So there is a certain appeal to many members in the amendment calling for annual cuts of $36 billion in the federal budget deficit, starting from a base of $210 billion, the deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. If Congress failed to cut deeply enough, the President could do it himself.

Even if the amendment were more straightforward and not loaded with constitutional traps, the United States would still be another $500 billion in debt by 1991, the year the plan would presumably pay off in a balanced budget.

But the larger problem, one that some supporters interpret as so Draconian that Congress would get its act together rather than allow it to happen, is the absolute control over spending that the amendment could give to the President.

If, for example, Congress were to decide in any given year that the budget should be balanced with a combination of tax increases and spending cuts, the President could simply veto the tax increases and cut spending as he saw fit.

Congress can change a budget-balancing law as easily as it can pass one, so it might as well keep it simple to reduce the temptation to back away from tight ceilings next year or the year after. The way to do that is to pledge annual $36-billion reductions and then make a decision on whether to meet the goal with spending cuts or tax increases that are tailored to conditions at the time.