Washington’s True Lie: No More Deficit : The political emphasis to balance the budget diverts attention from real issues.

President Clinton’s 10-year plan to balance the budget is a politician’s true lie. The President embraced the Republican lie--the promise of a balanced budget down the road--to reveal his true differences with the GOP. Ironically, he wound up highlighting the scope of his agreement instead.

The press reports the fiction as if it was fact, dutifully comparing the White House and congressional plans to balance the budget--in 10 years for the President; seven for the Republican Congress. In reality, all such plans are contingent whimsy. They are based on guesses about the economy--on growth, inflation, interest rates. Only one thing is certain: They will be revised. The plans also implausibly assume that future legislatures and Presidents will follow the path laid out by their predecessors, which hasn’t happened yet.

The current plans for a balanced budget are particularly disingenuous. For example, both the White House and the Republicans rely on significant savings from health-care spending--cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Both promise that the savings can be achieved while preserving and strengthening the programs, although neither has revealed how. Both stand ready to retreat at the first sign the elderly are getting restless.

Why the balanced budget lie? Pollsters tell politicians it is good politics; the federal deficit has come to symbolize a government that isn’t working. With Republicans taking bows for their “courage” in proposing a seven-year “glide path” to a balanced budget, the President decided join the chorus.

In reality, the obsession with the federal deficit is now largely misplaced. Because of the growth of the U.S. economy and the austere policies of the Clinton Administration’s first two years, the deficit is already smaller in relation to our economy than that of any other industrial country.

Sustaining such deficits are not difficult if the economy continues to grow. The real question is whether we are using the borrowed money sensibly or squandering it. That’s a question of priorities.

The differences between the priorities of the President and those of the Republican Congress will define the struggle over next year’s appropriations. House Republicans have voted to give the Pentagon $10 billion more than it asked for, while planning to cut domestic discretionary programs. They propose to give tax breaks to the wealthy, while raising taxes on the working poor. They will cut spending for education and training, student grants, loans and work-study programs, summer jobs, food stamps, infant nutrition, Head Start and other popular domestic programs, while protecting corporate welfare--the subsidies and tax breaks that reward corporate lobbies.

These unpopular choices, scarcely noticed amid the din over balancing the budget, will now come under scrutiny. But the White House balanced budget gambit has backfired, because it reveals that the President’s agreements with conservatives are far more telling than his disagreements. Yet while there are differences, they are slight.

Both would sustain Pentagon spending at virtual Cold War levels, while slashing domestic discretionary spending by 20% (Clinton) to 25% (Republicans). Yet, the United States no longer, in the words of retired Gen. Colin Powell, has “the luxury of an enemy to plan for.”

Both would cut Medicare without comprehensive health-care reform, burdening the elderly without solving the problem of runaway health-care costs. Both failed to address the growing public investment deficit. The United States will continue to lag behind other industrial nations in providing preschool education and day care for our children. Neither the President nor Republicans have any plan to renovate America’s decrepit public schools or to revive the cities. Both would spend more to put young men in jail than in jobs.

This makes for a politics of posturing divorced from substance. When the President issued his first veto, he captured the high ground rhetorically, denouncing reductions in college scholarships and loans, education and training funds. But in terms of actual dollars, the differences between the President and his Republican opponents were nominal at best.

This positioning may serve the President politically, but the shared fictions and false distinctions reflect a constricted political debate that slights real challenges facing the country. With an economy that is generating ever more inequality and insecurity and an electorate searching for answers, Washington’s true lies will only contribute to the corrosive cynicism that makes real change increasingly difficult.