Elixir of Tomorrowism

Last year Gramm-Rudman was hawked to the public as the bitter medicine that the country had to swallow to work itself out of the budget-deficit crisis. Today, with an election less than two months off, Gramm-Rudman resembles a meaningless placebo and the deficit continues out of control.

The problem with Gramm-Rudman from the beginning was that the country cannot run on automatic pilot. Even with its threat of arbitrary budget cuts, real deficit reduction could not be achieved unless Congress and the President had the will to do it.

Lacking that, Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) prescribed this solution: “Let’s declare victory . . . and move on to lower deficits next year.” Scarlett O’Hara and David A. Stockman would be proud of that tomorrowism.

Now the Reagan Administration has swallowed Dr. Kemp’s elixir. Budget chief James C. Miller III reviewed all the figures and discovered that the Gramm-Rudman dragon could be slain without the onus of more drastic spending cuts. Just the week before, Miller was preparing a new $20-billion list of reductions to help Congress reach the Gramm-Rudman target of a $144-billion deficit in fiscal 1987, beginning Oct. 1.

But now it is being suggested that such a painful remedy might not be necessary after all. The Administration suddenly is willing to count an $11-billion windfall from the tax-reform bill against the 1987 deficit. That, plus the sale of Conrail and some jiggering of accounting methods, and Dr. Kemp’s prescription is filled.

This is illusion, of course. One Republican senator called it pure fakery. The latest estimate of the 1986 deficit, $163 billion, is optimistic at best. Now we are told that the real Gramm-Rudman target is not really $144 billion but $154 billion, since the law contained a $10-billion fudge-factor. The numbers fit if you do not examine them too closely. The key to Gramm-Rudman lies in today’s official estimates, not tomorrow’s reality.

Congressional budget-makers have vowed to find an additional $10 billion in savings anyway. But the White House rejects any further cuts in defense or foreign aid, and most members of Congress will not accept additional domestic reductions. The only point of agreement is that everyone wants to avoid triggering automatic cuts.

The deficit charade demonstrates that Gramm-Rudman’s arbitrary cuts were impractical to begin with, and probably would not have been imposed even if the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the trigger mechanism.

In spite of all the dancing around Gramm-Rudman targets, Congress has managed to produce some significant savings this year--primarily by forcing the defense budget back toward more realistic bounds. The fact that the Administration did not fight harder to save its original defense request is probably because there was little public support for it.

In sum, one Congress member noted, the 99th Congress hit a home run on tax reform but got only a scratch single on deficit reduction. A priority of the 100th Congress next year must be to junk Gramm-Rudman tinkering and embark on real budget reform that includes adequate revenues to pay for national needs.