The Red Whirlpool

Rejecting calls for a summit meeting on the budget, a White House spokesman derided Democrats the other day for engaging in “the same old tax-and-spend policies” of the past. Well, that is somewhat better than borrow-and-spend, which is the course the Administration has pursued with abandon for the last six years. The consequence of such borrowing is staggering, but the Administration prefers to ignore it or blame it on someone else.

While everyone has focused on Gary Hart and the Iran- contra hearings, a new national debt limit deadline has crept up on Washington. The existing $2.3-trillion debt ceiling expires Friday. At that point, the limit would drop back to $2.1 trillion, thus preventing the government from borrowing any money to pay its bills, which is the only way the government has paid its bills for far too long. The Administration quietly has asked Congress to increase the ceiling by another half a trillion dollars, to $2.8 trillion. The national debt was just about $1 trillion when President Reagan took office in January, 1981.

Meanwhile, the White House blithely goes about its budget business as if nothing had changed since 1981--as if it had not piled up more debt in less than six years than all the previous Presidents in American history combined. The President’s 1988 budget proposed more defense increases and more domestic cuts, a combination ignored repeatedly by Congress as smoke, mirrors and pie in the sky. Republicans in Congress refused to deal seriously with Democratic leaders as the House and Senate passed their versions of a 1988 budget resolution.

The White House will not even talk budget compromise, although the result of not talking is likely to be one of two unpleasant and imprudent consequences: either more debt or arbitrary cuts under amendments being proposed to the Gramm-Rudman debt-reduction act.

The Democrats certainly will not fashion the perfect budget this week as a conference committee reconciles differences between the House and Senate resolutions. But the proposal will restore some equity between domestic and defense spending--restoring, for instance, some of the deep Administration cuts in education--and will provide a significant decrease in the annual deficit in the spirit of Gramm-Rudman. The cost is a modest tax increase of about $18 billion annually. The budget resolution does not spell out the sort of taxes that would be raised, but Democratic budget leaders generally have agreed it would be a package of excise levies including those on cigarettes, alcoholic beverages and energy--probably on gasoline at the service station pump.

Budgeting this way is not much fun and does not gain one instant political points. But it is necessary. Chairman Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.) of the Senate Budget Committee said, “This debate is whether we’re going to borrow more money or begin to live a little bit within our means.”

Republicans chuckle while watching the Democrats dig themselves a political hole with their proposed tax increase. It just may be, however, that Americans find this preferable to the whirlpool of red ink that threatens to drag the entire economy down the drain.