Muddling Through the Budget

Washington analysts are sorting out style and substance as they take the measure of George Bush and his first 100 days. This is a mostly harmless exercise in gauging the impact of White House puppies and horseshoe pits vis-a-vis Contra aid and response to the Alaskan oil spill. The assessments will wind up being mixed. What counts over time is results, and there are not many of them to measure in the first 100 days of most administrations.

In awarding himself high marks Monday, Bush cited a bipartisan budget agreement with Congress as one of his major achievements. The budget deal was not a triumph of either style or substance, however, but of illusion. The best that can be said is that it fudges the deficit issue for another year, thus allowing Bush to avert a major clash with the Democratic Congress and to fulfill his no-new-taxes pledge for a respectable period of time.

There was no particular surprise in this. Bush tediously taught the nation to lip-read last year with his no-tax pledge. He could not afford to break that vow in his first year. And congressional budget leaders--most of them--were willing co-conspirators in fashioning a budget deal that put off all the tough issues for another year. This was the illegitimate offspring of honeymoon politics.

It all seems innocent and convenient enough. The harm is that Americans may be deluded into believing that all this congeniality may result in some real deficit reduction. The agreement purports to meet the fiscal 1990 Gramm-Rudman budget deficit target of $100 billion. In fact, it is based on a lot of suppositions and assumptions that cannot come true, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The committee claims that even if every single assumption is correct, the 1990 deficit still would be $125 billion. And that, of course, is illusion, too, since the figure does not include $153 billion in Social Security and other trust-fund surpluses that are counted against the deficit even though they are reserves earmarked to meet future spending requirements.

So in spite of the agreement, the United States is headed for its ninth consecutive year of budget deficits in excess of $100 billion, and the total federal debt will exceed $2.4 trillion, three times what it was when Ronald Reagan took office. Congress and the President bought time this year. They, and the American people, will have to pay the price next year.