Senate Approves $1.46-Trillion Budget, Rejects Defense Trims

The Senate on Thursday approved a $1.46-trillion budget for 1992 that ignores President Bush’s plan to slash Medicare, preserves his proposed defense spending and boosts his requests for education, transportation and other health programs.

The Democratic measure was adopted on a voice vote after three days of debate.

Bridled by a $290-billion deficit, the spending plan contains no dramatic domestic initiatives. Republicans put their stamp on the measure with a provision making it all but impossible for taxes to be raised to pay for any new programs that Congress enacts later in the year.

The budget contains no tax increases. But it also rejects Bush’s call for a reduction in the capital gains tax rate, a proposal that lawmakers have turned down two years in a row.

During the third day of debate on the spending plan, liberal Democrats launched several unsuccessful attacks on the $295.3 billion it contains for defense spending.

That amount matched what Bush proposed for the military and obeyed the defense spending limit set in last fall’s deficit reduction deal. But liberals argued that, with the Cold War now over, money should be shifted from the Pentagon to domestic programs--a transfer that the deficit reduction accord forbids.

“We need to reorder our priorities,” said Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), who proposed cutting the defense budget by $6 billion and using half of the money to reduce the deficit and the other half to beef up social programs. “Times have changed,” he insisted.

Republicans countered that the Soviet Union remains too unstable for the United States to reduce military expenditures any further.

“I believe it’s going too far,” Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said of Bradley’s proposal.

Bradley’s amendment was rejected, 73 to 22. The Senate also defeated a proposal by Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) to cut the defense budget by the same $6 billion and use all of the money for deficit reduction. And it voted against a second Simon amendment that would have reduced military spending by $3 billion.

The budget is what the name implies--a spending plan. Actual spending still must be done through appropriations bills. But adoption of the budget forces appropriations committees to observe its ceilings.