Why the Budget Figures Never Pan Out

Sen. Bob Dole is a stand-up, honest guy, so when a Washington Post reporter asked him last month how the Senate was going to cope with the budget, tax and other urgent problems on its agenda he couldn’t resist telling the painful truth.

“With mirrors,” he said.

Which is a sad commentary on what I call the Games of August--the annual effort by the politicians to fool themselves, and us, into thinking that they’re doing something about our scandalous budget deficits.

For a while this year they thought that they had found an exit from their fun house with the Gramm-Rudman gimmick--let a computer make the defense, welfare and other cuts that they didn’t want to have to explain to the voters this fall. But the U.S. Supreme Court told them no.

So now they’re back on the spot, with an election coming up and the country going deeper into the red every day. Just about the time that the court broke the bad news, the Administration had to admit again that, guess what? There had been a miscalculation in the size of the 1986 deficit!

No, it’s not going to come out at $180 billion, as they said a year ago, or even at $202 billion, as they recalculated last February. No, this year it’ll set another all-time record at $230 billion.

Basically the Games of August go like this: Underestimate the deficit from the outset. Pretend that some of those Medicare or defense costs won’t show up in the next 12 months. Pretend that tax receipts will be bigger. Make the deficit look small enough to stave off a taxpayer revolt, and over the next nine or 10 months, while no one is looking, stick in $10 billion here and $15 billion there that they knew were coming due all along.

Then fess up during the dog days of August, when most people won’t notice.

The taxpayers are getting flimflammed. You see, they have to borrow the money to cover the shortfall, and we get stuck for the interest forever more.

They don’t want us to think about that extra debt piling up this year. They want us to focus on how much better things will be next year. Meanwhile, the budget planners get busy again with assumptions based on the gross national product, inflation, tax receipts, how many new tanks the Army will need, how many people will need food stamps and so on. The problem is that the assumptions are almost always wrong.

Add up the miscalculations over the last five years, and just the overruns alone come to $278 billion!

And if those figures depress you, you don’t want to know about the five-year projections, because they’ll send you into shock. The fact is that in 1981, when the master plan was written, the Administration said that it would balance the budget by 1985 and that this year, 1986, we’d actually have a surplus of $28 billion.

April Fool! That $28-billion surplus turns out to be a $230-billion deficit!

All this started, of course, when the supply-siders took over and said that if we cut taxes the revenues would shoot up so fast that we could not only balance the books but re-equip the armed services to boot. It sounded like a sweet deal. The only problem was that it didn’t make any sense. Every year while these deficits have been piling up, by the way, the President has been calling for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, and has been pointing the finger at a spendthrift Congress. I don’t know why he just doesn’t submit a balanced budget.

We can’t just blame the Administration. Congress is a big part of this conspiracy of self-delusion, too. The Administration tries to downplay the deficit because it wants to keep the “feel-good times” rolling. Congress has been winking at the phony estimates to keep pet programs intact.

But in a democracy the final blame rests with “We the People.” In the end it’s our fault because we keep listening to what the politicians are promising for next year without holding them accountable now for what they promised us last year.

The fun house is open again. The Administration has proposed a budget with “only” a $171.5-billion deficit for next year. Congress has worked up a budget plan (not a real budget yet, just a plan) for a $184-billion deficit. Both are full of the usual assumptions that never seem to pan out.

If things go according to the usual script, the numbers won’t quite add up again, but we’ll be told not to worry because they’ll eventually be balanced.

So far, all that Congress has really done has been to vote the annual increase in the debt ceiling so they we can keep on borrowing, and it’s still trying to find a way to resuscitate Gramm-Rudman somehow.

The honest thing would be for it to just stand up and vote the cuts that the computer was supposed to make, but it won’t do that with an election coming up.

So the conspiracy is in full swing again. They’re making fools of us.

And an election is the time for all of us to stop winking at this charade. It’s the time to ask all those running for Congress when and how they intend to cut the deficit. Then let’s remember what they promise, and hold them accountable.