GOP Spending Measures

If The Times agrees that our federal budget be balanced, and that all it takes is congressional courage (editorial, Feb. 13), why after more than two generations, has it not been done?

It is exactly because of lack of political courage that we need something more binding than the promises from our Congress and our presidents.

Even though almost everything has been tried (freezes, caps, Gramm-Rudman, raising takes, etc.), the national debt will keep growing by about 5% a year.

You claim that the Constitution should not be amended in haste, yet Congress has been debating this amendment for the past five years. And what’s wrong with transferring fiscal control to the judiciary? We did it with abortion and civil rights.

Until The Times, or anyone else, can come up with a better solution than the use of the word, “courage,” why not give the balanced-budget amendment a chance? If it doesn’t work, it can always be repealed, just as Prohibition was in 1933.

ARNOLD FRIEDMAN

Beverly Hills

David Broder (Commentary, Feb. 12) says, “The worst of it is that this decade represents the last, best chance to achieve real fiscal discipline.” Not to worry. The current Republican congressmen have promised that they are going to seriously cut spending. They mean business! No longer will legitimate strategy for debt reduction get lost in a labyrinth of parliamentary verbosity. They mean business! If we cannot depend on the Republicans in Congress to keep their word, what is left that we can depend on?

FRANK S. MORRIS

Westminster

Thank goodness for Robert Scheer (Column Left, Feb. 12)! He is almost the only person willing to speak bluntly about what Speaker Newt Gingrich and his gang are really up to.

If only Clinton and the media would quit treating them as if they mean well and acting as if their so-called “contract” is honorable. They don’t and it isn’t.

DIANTHA SMITH

Yorba Linda

Re the GOP proposal to compensate with government funds land owners whose property falls in value due to federal (environmental) regulations, I must agree with law professor Peter Byrne, who calls this plan “profoundly stupid and deeply cynical” (“Administration Blasts Plan,” Feb. 11). Even more stupid and cynical is a remark made by property-rights expert Roger Pilon of the CATO Institute: “It may be that not every species is worth saving.” The height of capitalist arrogance and shortsightedness, this statement does remind us that yes, indeed, one species, as well as its lush habitat, may not deserve preservation: anti-conservation conservatives snugly ensconced in their hermetically-sealed think tanks.

TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER

Los Angeles

Voters didn’t repudiate Clinton and his gang of Democratic congressional gasbags because they cut the deficit. It was because they proposed new additional spending; because they proposed a new health care system dominated by new government bureaucracies; because Clinton proposed a new welfare system that would’ve cost $9 billion more than we are now spending, and finally, because they just didn’t cut enough.

What Americans want is not a tax cut. We want to end borrowing and runaway spending, which is eroding our children’s economic future and sapping their hope.

PAUL RICHARD

San Diego