News ANALYSIS : Why the Mess? Lawmakers Go Separate Ways

Why can’t the federal government clean up its budget mess?

At the heart of the fiscal gridlock that has paralyzed Washington this weekend is a cruel fact: To the average voter, the benefits of reducing the deficit lie somewhere in the uncertain future, while the costs are visible and painful to the public right now.

And in an era when political parties have lost their influence over voters--and members of Congress must stand or fall as individuals on Election Day--a large majority of lawmakers found it far safer politically to pick the $500-billion budget compromise apart than to support it.

“I’m not elected by the President,” said Rep. Lynn Martin (R-Ill.), an outspoken opponent of the budget package who is engaged in a tough election battle to oust Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.). “I’m elected by my district--and my district thinks I’ve done the right thing.”

As a result, practically the only thing upon which lawmakers can agree today is that they disagree with each other.

“It’s not that the center didn’t hold,” says Brookings Institution scholar Joseph White, co-author of “The Deficit and the Public Interest.” “It’s that there isn’t any center left any more.”

For almost a decade, the battle over the deficit has eclipsed almost everything else in domestic policy and left the government divided--between an unruly Democratic Congress, often beholden to special interests, and a conservative White House driven by ideological passions.

President Bush’s decision to abandon his no-new-taxes pledge and negotiate a compromise with middle-of-the-road congressional leaders was supposed to have changed all that.

But Bush may have waited too long. Today, Congress is split into at least four camps, with many members holding strong beliefs on the best way to close the budget gap.

“The passions are intense--the issues are of enormous concern to everybody,” Richard G. Darman, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” program. “It’s the good of the country that’s at stake, but it’s also people’s ability to get themselves reelected.”

On the Democratic side, one group insists that the deficit is all the fault of former President Ronald Reagan and that the principal cure should be to reverse the 1980s and raise taxes on the wealthy.

Meanwhile, another group of Democrats argues that the deficit really is not much of a problem. They suggest that it is time to spend more freely on domestic problems that have festered over the last decade.

On the Republican side, one group agrees that the deficit is a problem but blames Democrats for not being willing to cut spending.

But there is just as much conviction among a large core of conservatives that the deficit is not responsible for any economic ills and that the solution to the current slowdown is to cut taxes even more.

That doesn’t leave much room in the middle for the Establishment Democrats and Republicans, who recognize that the federal government’s well-entrenched benefit programs for the elderly--which now make up roughly half of all federal spending outside of interest on government borrowing--are threatening to devour the rest of the budget.

“Folks, if we cannot make any savings in the entitlement programs at this time, I do not know where we are going to be in a generation,” House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) pleaded Thursday night just before the budget compromise was rejected.

“We are not going to have any pie to distribute in a few years because entitlements are driving discretionary spending down,” Michel said. The Medicare program, for example, now costs the public more than $100 billion a year and is rising at more than 12% a year.

But when budget negotiators sought to raise that part of Medicare paid by the elderly to help finance the program’s skyrocketing costs, lawmakers gagged.

“What are we socking it to the elderly for?” asked Rep. Silvio O. Conte (R-Mass.). “Where are they going to get the money?”

Where they are getting it from now is future generations, who will be asked to bear the swelling burden of federal borrowing used to cover the gap between revenues and expenditures.

Interest payments on the federal debt, which now are higher as a proportion of the total economy than at any other time in history, are expected to reach almost $260 billion this year.

Interest soon could be the largest component of the budget--exceeding the allowance for the Pentagon and Social Security.

Congress and the White House have tried almost everything in an effort to get the deficit under control:

--They reformed the budget process more than 15 years ago.

--Five years ago--convinced that the only way to force action was to hold a gun to their own heads--lawmakers created the doomsday machinery of the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction law. The law requires Congress to set yearly targets for reducing the budget deficit and mandates automatic across-the-board cuts in federal spending if the lawmakers fail to meet them.

--This year, they isolated a few top officials in a room for 4 1/2 months--and the House promptly rejected the result that the negotiators produced.

“The fact that you had the elite going off talking to the elite and protecting the elite really hurt any serious consideration of the plan,” Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) argued.

Everything has failed.

At the same time, however, the economic collapse that so many experts predicted if the federal government did not curb its appetite for borrowing did not materialize, either.

“If there were any justice in the world, there would be a dramatic end to the deficit story,” says Paul Krugman, a former Council of Economic Advisers staffer who now is a sadder and wiser economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The adverse consequences of the deficit would become spectacularly apparent in an economic crisis and the public would rise up and throw the rascals out,” Krugman says.

“But of course,” he adds, “there isn’t any justice in the world.”