Those Evil Interests

Congress has adopted a 1988 federal budget resolution that President Reagan stridently condemns as an economy-destroying giveaway to vague, evil “special interests” that he never identifies. Just what are those special interests that Congress seeks to help with more money than the Reagan Administration is willing to give?

For starters, they include the hungry, the homeless, the elderly, the ill, the jobless, the students, the small businesses, the veterans and those who are interested in an adequate highway system, bridges that won’t fall down, and safe airways.

This is not a perfect budget, certainly. It has its share of gimmicks to make the ultimate deficit figure look better than it really is. It calls for $19.3 billion in unspecified tax increases that the President has vowed to veto. But the 1988 congressional budget, which would cut the deficit by $37 billion, is far from the Chicken Little disaster that the President claims.

On the defense side, it essentially would continue the extravagant military buildup that the President launched in 1981. The President can have an additional $6 billion if he agrees to a tax increase that amounts to only one-tenth of this year’s deficit borrowing. On the domestic side, the budget struggles to maintain programs that have been cut repeatedly since 1981 without even attempting to regain any of the ground lost since then.

Even with the restoration of some of Reagan’s cuts, most items in the domestic budget still are below the Congressional Budget Office baseline for 1988--the amount that would be needed to maintain those programs at current levels of service.

Some of the domestic items include $2.3 billion more for education; $150 million for the supplemental food program for infants, women and children; about $1 billion for welfare reform and assistance to dislocated workers, and $600 million for health care for the poor. The budget also would restore some Reagan cuts in aid to the homeless, AIDS programs, veterans’ health care, the Job Corps, the highway construction program and air-traffic safety.

These are not gold-plated programs, but essential services that have been eroded by Reagan budgets every year. The President complains about runaway domestic spending and congressional cuts in his bloated defense budget, but defense spending has increased three times as much as have domestic outlays in the past seven years.

The Reagan crusade during this summer of the Constitution’s bicentennial is to travel the land and warn the people about what Congress is doing to them. He calls it stumping for fairness for the American people. “We got the special interests out of the tax code, now let’s get them out of the budget,” he says.

But just who are these special interests? They are people without homes, enough food or health care; the handicapped, veterans of past wars, poor students trying to get an education, workers whose jobs have been eliminated, families struggling to get off welfare. They are people.

Perhaps by summer’s end the people will begin telling their members of Congress that they are tired of what the Reagan Administration pretends to be doing for them, as well as what the Administration has done to them.