A Budget, Like Magic

President Reagan is being a fussbudget again.

Twice in the past week he has berated the Congressional budget process and dusted off the old palliative of reforming the way budgets are put together. “The budget process is indeed a sorry spectacle, more like a magic show,” the President said in his weekly radio address Saturday. “It’s wink and blink and smoke and mirrors and pulling rabbits out of hats.”

There is much to be said about the frustrations of the budget process. Ask any member of Congress. But it must be said also, time and again, that budget reform will not balance the budget.

The major problem with the budget process in recent years is that there has been only one player, Congress. The President sends his budget to Capitol Hill and then withdraws from the playing field, except to keep up his drumbeat against the big spenders and taxers on the Hill. This might be acceptable practice if the Administration’s budget was a realistic one. But, in fact, it is the President’s 1988 budget that has rabbits jumping out of hats and seeing their images in smoky mirrors.

The White House budget pretends to meet the coming year’s Gramm-Rudman deficit goal of $108 billion. The Congressional Budget Office says, however, that the President’s plan misses the target by more than $25 billion, and then only by counting proposed domestic spending cuts and asset sales that were unacceptable to Congress even when Republicans controlled the Senate.

There is only one practical and reasonable way to fill the gap and that is a modest increase in federal revenues. Even then it will be impossible to hit the Gramm-Rudman target, but the net effect would be a deficit reduction of about $36 billion. Gramm-Rudman projected successive $36 billion cuts in the deficit.

But the White House refuses to involve itself, reform or no reform. The President says his pledge to veto any tax increase is rock-solid. He rejects Democratic overtures to meet on the budget. The President’s program is working economic miracles, he says.

Well, miracles, perhaps, if one ignores the fact that the federal debt has grown more than $1 trillion since the day in 1980 that candidate Reagan campaigned on a program of cutting taxes, boosting defense spending and balancing the budget all at the same time. Talk about wink and blink and smoke and mirrors and pulling rabbits out of hats. As the Queen said in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”