Warped Vision

In signing his 1988 federal budget, President Reagan described it as not just pages of long rows of numbers but as “a plan, a vision of what America is and where America is going.” But the document that he submitted to Congress on Monday offers only a narrow perspective of what America is and a limited glimpse of where the nation is going.

Walking through the pages of the 1988 budget, one sees ever-longer lines of nuclear-tipped missiles. The fleets of warplanes grow larger. More giant ships would join the battle fleet. There would be new billions for a “Star Wars” shield that may, or may not, protect America from enemy missiles. And somewhere, in a chapter marked “Confidential,” is another $100 million or so to be thrown into the jungles of Central America for the contras .

When the President first took office, he talked of restoring America to that historic moral vision of a shining city on the hill. But the warm sunlight of the new budget basks mostly on the pages set aside for defense and foreign aid. Domestic programs designed to help the people are relegated to the shadows of the back of the book.

The story is a familiar one. Food stamps for the poor, reduced. Money for preserving the nation’s parklands and historic heritage, cut again. Aid to poor mothers and families struggling to survive on welfare, down by nearly $1 billion. Funds to revive the nation’s deteriorating highway and transit systems, slashed. Loans to provide a good college education for our brightest young people, yes, but charge them a full interest rate. Health care for the elderly and the poor, make them pay more.

Always there is the bottom line: no new programs, no new taxes, but promise to slay the deficit dragon so long as money for the military machine is not jeopardized.

There are some rare, isolated brighter spots in the 1988 budget. The White House proposes a major increase in research and education funds to combat AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, from the $410 million that Congress appropriated this past year to $534 million. Still, scientific and health experts say that this is not nearly enough to wage an effective battle against the AIDS epidemic.

And the new budget proposes a major revision of the runaway farm program that now doles out millions to corporate farmers, too often for growing crops that we do not need and cannot sell. In implementing such a plan, Congress must be certain that the plight of the true family farm is not made even more desperate.

On the whole, however, the new Reagan budget reads like a story out of the twilight zone, frozen in time at noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when the Reagan Revolution was poised to bowl over Washington with all its conventional wisdoms and inside-the-beltway notions about government.

The opinion polls indicate that the American people still admire Ronald Reagan personally, but they demonstrate as well that a solid majority of Americans has had enough of the Reagan Revolution’s blunt assault on government. The 1988 budget gives only token recognition of the fact that Congress, even before Democrats won control of the Senate, repeatedly has rejected the White House’s efforts to wipe out scores of domestic programs.

This is 1987, not 1981. The recognizable benefits of the Reagan Era will not be rolled back. But now is a time to build for a future in which Americans can truly stand tall not by virtue of the number of missiles in our arsenal but because of how we, as a society, treat our least-fortunate fellow citizens, heal our ill, care for our elderly, educate our young people, cherish our land and preserve our heritage.

Only then will we fulfill the legacy of the shining city on the hill.