COLUMN RIGHT : Sacred Cows Should Go on the Block : Forget new taxes and look harder at ‘protected programs.’

Airplanes grounded. The FBI prostrate. One million armed services personnel unleashed, unemployed, on innocent society. The pooh-bahs of the Bush Administration now are telling us, with straight faces, that the spending cuts mandated by Gramm-Rudman will yield nothing short of apocalypse; hence the need for the rest of us to send Washington more money.

Oh, please. Can anyone possibly believe that a government about to spend more than $1.2 trillion (that’s 11 zeros) has insufficient resources? Budget Director Richard Darman is playing the old game of publicizing potential reductions in the most defensible and needed programs, just as local officials always threaten to cut fire protection and trash collection instead of the ubiquitous subsidies for local interest groups. The cuts about which Darman has developed a new-found fear of God are those mandated by Gramm-Rudman, which exempts about half of all federal spending from automatic cuts, and subjects another quarter to automatic cuts that are only partial.

But if a budget summit “with no preconditions” can address taxes and the Gramm-Rudman deadlines, why then can it not change the federal programs subject to automatic reduction?

How about cutting out the farm subsidy programs, a source of enormous resource waste and environmental damage? That would save about $15 billion immediately. Now that the Soviet departure from Germany is a foregone conclusion, the new international climate allows us to move back toward the traditional U.S. peacetime posture of small standing armed forces. Let’s be conservative; a personnel cut of only 20% would save another $16 billion. A 15% cut in defense investment would save about $20 billion.

Well, thus far we’ve saved $51 billion. Don’t worry: there’s plenty more. The NASA space station is a boondoggle with no defined purpose other than provision of busy work for the space shuttles. Chalk up another $1 billion. A partial one-year freeze in Social Security spending would save about $10 billion. Most energy programs are little more than subsidies for expensive, wasteful projects in various congressional districts--another $1 billion could be saved easily. And how about the Army Corps of Engineers? Should the taxpayers subsidize environmentally destructive water projects for various special interests? The question answers itself: We’ve just saved another $1 billion plus.

This is fun: Just think of the party we could throw with the $64 billion that we’ve saved in just a few paragraphs. (A party, you see, would benefit society at large by keeping me out of my office, thus reducing the damage that I cause.) Shall we save another half-billion or so? Away with the Export-Import Bank, which is essentially a piggy bank for aircraft manufacturers. How about the Department of Education? It is, after all, little more than a central receiving station for the demands of the National Education Assn. and the other permanent special interests seeking a continued state of socialism in U.S. education. Various federal programs perpetuate this absurdity; eliminating them would improve educational quality and save at least $4 billion.

Another $1 billion could come from deletion of mass-transit subsidies, which will not and cannot reduce either traffic congestion or pollution. A change of focus in the space program toward smaller, more useful and more manageable projects would save about $1 billion. The Small Business Administration is little more than a trough for various business interests with good political connections; another half-billion or so. More than $1 billion could be saved by slashing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a bureaucracy with a noble name but a miserable track record and virtually no prospects for improvement. Get rid of the Postal Service and put mail delivery where it belongs, in the private sector; that’s $3 billion. More than $1 billion could be saved by eliminating public housing programs --one of the most perverse social policies ever conceived--and replacing them with housing vouchers.

We have a federal budget with almost 200,000 line items; for practical purposes, then, the list of candidates for contributions to our savings account is endless. There is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, already brimming with 600 million barrels. There is the Rural Electrification Administration loan program; the Power Marketing Administration subsidies. Foreign aid subsidies. The Naval Petroleum Reserves. Ad infinitum. If the politicians tell you that they just cannot get along without more taxes, remind them that federal spending is larger than the GNP of every other nation on earth, except Japan and possibly the Soviet Union. Then throw the budget at them. Literally.