The Huge Moment That Is Now Clinton’s : Here is a make-or-break test of a nascent presidency

Tonight, Americans will learn the details of the sacrifices their President wants them to make as part of his effort to tame the monstrous federal budget deficit and fuel a more vigorous economic recovery. Thursday will begin the organized clamor from the spokespersons of the thousand and one special interest groups--and formally or not, knowingly or not, we all belong to such groups--that stand to lose something if President Clinton’s economic plan is put into effect.

Recent polls have found a majority of Americans affirming their readiness to make the sacrifices Clinton talks about--ready, that is, to pay higher taxes--to reduce the deficit. But the question the polls put is an abstraction. While the response seems encouragingly to reflect a widening recognition that national prosperity is in peril if the deficit is not shrunk, it is a response that has not been shaped by hard information about just what sacrifices could be required. The real test will come when the abstract is made unmistakably specific, when voters must face the imminent possibility that their wages and dividends, their Social Security income, the energy they use and the beer they drink and a lot else besides might be taxed more.

Candidate Clinton assured middle-class voters all during his campaign that he intended to ease their tax burden. President Clinton was compelled to confess on Monday night that, though he labored hard to make good on that promise, he now sees no choice but to increase the middle class’ burden. The bitter pill was coated with a promise that today’s sacrifices will pave the way for a more prosperous tomorrow. But tomorrow is also an abstraction. Americans, at least recently, have not been noted for thinking too seriously about their economic tomorrows; witness the low rate of national savings. Could that be changing now, after a political campaign--and give Ross Perot his full due--that finally began educating the public to focus more on the growing threat posed by an ever-rising deficit?

It’s a near-certainty that every tax increase, every spending reduction, every loophole-closing measure that Clinton’s economic plan will propose can be justified on the basis of compelling economic need and--of key political importance--of equity. It’s a near-certainty as well that every rise in taxes that is proposed, every scheduled program cut, can be faulted or challenged on the grounds that it could do more harm than good and produce more pain than gain. The paradox arises, of course, from the inherent inexactitudes of economic assumptions, and from an inability to measure such emotions as fear and hope or such driving forces as greed or altruism. In the end, of course, the economy is the product of billions of individual decisions. Some are rational, many are not, as those who watch the acrobatics of the stock market know.

Americans will have a clearer idea not too many hours from now of what their economic future could hold, when the tough specifics of the President’s plan emerge. Here, surely, will be the make-or-break test of Clinton’s nascent leadership. Here, too, will be a momentous challenge for Congress, for the deficit crisis leaves no choice: If Congress cannot in general support the President’s program, it had better be ready in short order to devise and offer a feasible alternative of its own.