Democrats Call Bush Priorities Flawed; Medicare Cut Assailed : Reaction: They criticize lack of measures to aid the jobless. Requests for defense reductions are muted in deference to the Persian Gulf War.

L.A. Times Archives

Feb. 5, 1991 12 AM PT

From Times Wire Services

WASHINGTON —

Congressional Democrats assailed President Bush’s budget Monday, charging that his priorities for domestic spending are deeply flawed and calling his proposal to cut $25 billion in Medicare spending “an insult to America’s seniors.”

“This is a cross your fingers, close your eyes, hope for the best budget,” Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee said. Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) called it a “don’t worry, be happy budget.”

Although Democrats praised Bush for recommending additional funds for some domestic programs, they sharply criticized him for pushing space and science programs and totally ignoring anti-recession measures that would aid the jobless.

Their harshest criticism, however, was reserved for Bush’s proposal to cut Medicare--the health insurance program for the elderly--by $25 billion by cutting back reimbursements to doctors and hospitals.

Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), head of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the cuts were “provocative and unacceptable. These proposals are nothing more than an insult to America’s seniors. That is why they are dead on arrival.”

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Oakland), chairman of the House Ways and Means Medicare subcommittee, said the Medicare proposal was “like a Scud missile: big, slow-moving and unsophisticated but with potential to do a lot of damage.”

The Gray Panthers organization said the proposal “reflects the President’s failed domestic leadership by not addressing the need for comprehensive health reform.”

Democrats faulted Bush as lacking a real domestic program but soft-pedaled their past calls for defense spending cuts out of deference to the Persian Gulf War.

Although both parties moved quickly to extract political advantage from the fiscal plans, the reaction even of advocacy groups was far more muted than in other years. The war has inhibited open partisanship and the five-year budget agreement of last October leaves little room for major shifts in spending plans.

Referring to the specific spending limits in that agreement, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), ranking GOP member of the Budget Committee, said: “We’re not in a bidding war anymore. The spending caps hold us to the same level, Democrat or Republican.” Sasser said Congress is “simply reduced to cannibalizing the budget,” trading off a cut in one program for an increase in another.

Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), House Budget Committee chairman, criticized the absence of “a comprehensive energy policy” in the Bush budget, and House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said the same criticism could be made of other major domestic fields.

Panetta said Bush’s budget confirms the President’s double vision of America: one militarily strong, a world leader with no limit on resources; the other on the home front facing recession, unemployment, hunger and homelessness for which “there is no commitment of resources.”

Gephardt promised that House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) will offer a broad Democratic blueprint Thursday when he addresses the National Press Club.

Democrats teed off on the most publicized feature of Bush’s domestic program: the suggestion that at least $15 billion of federal grant-in-aid programs be wrapped into a package for the states to spend as they please. Gephardt called it “another twist of federalism” that “adds nothing to the debate.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group, said that despite the recession, the President was proposing “an overall reduction of $760 million in funding for low-income, non-entitlement programs” while offering “no supplemental assistance for unemployed workers and their families” and eliminating a program that aids workers who lose jobs as a result of foreign competition.

Democrats also suggested that Bush drop any plans for a cut in the capital gains tax--a key issue in last year’s politically divisive battle of the budget.

Foley warned that “certainly if it were to go forward, I think it would invite other kinds of tax changes.”

Bush sought to insulate himself against the Democrats’ predictable criticism by offering his own proposals “to increase fairness” in two big entitlement programs, suggesting that farm subsidies be denied to people with non-farm incomes of more than $125,000 and that individuals making at least that amount pay for most of their Medicare Part B benefits.

Democrats say they do not want any expansion of means tests for Medicare and that a similar proposal already had been rejected by Congress. But Budget Director Richard G. Darman and other Administration officials clearly enjoyed putting the onus for defending such benefits on the opposition party.

The President’s budget presentation emphasized how much federal aid goes to people well beyond the poverty line--and how well senior citizens have done, contrasted with children.

Administration officials said that, if the economic situation allows more room for new spending next year, Bush will try to identify himself even more with programs designed to keep young people from a lifetime of poverty.

While touching lightly on that 1992 election theme, Bush sought to defend himself against a charge of hypocrisy on his well-remembered 1988 Boston Harbor cleanup pledge. Last year, when his defeated presidential rival, Michael S. Dukakis, was governor of Massachusetts, Bush omitted any earmarked funding for Boston Harbor. Gov. William F. Weld, the Republican who was elected to succeed Dukakis last November, said Monday he had discussed the harbor appropriation with Darman and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

THE BUDGET AT A GLANCE:

In billions of dollars per fiscal year.

1991

Receipts: 1,091.4

Outlays: 1,409.6

Deficit: -318.1

1992

Receipts: 1,165.0

Outlays: 1,445.9

Deficit: -280.9

1993

Receipts: 1,252.7