Most of the other candidates’ deficit-cutting talk is plain baloney. To George Bush and Bill Clinton, cutting deficits ranks somewhere in vote-getting appeal behind the American Battle Monuments Commission, say, or patent-law reform. So Bush mentions budget balancing just once in his campaign bible, the 29-page “Agenda for American Renewal.” Clinton, in his full-blown 172-page campaign-issues book, “Putting People First,” mentions the deficit twice up front and then forgets it. The two major-party candidates’ priorities lie elsewhere-in traditional promise-’em-anything election-year politics.
George Bush’s center-right budget pitch is a call to promote jobs and economic growth in the private sector through a whopping $1 10 billion per year in reductions in government expenditures (this equals an across-the-board 10 percent slaughter of the entire civilian budget). Bush rewards such austerity with tax reductions, roughly $75 billion in tax cuts for entrepreneurs and small business, for the middle class and to provide health insurance for the uninsured. Deficit reduction is a mathematical afterthought. Bush simply has $35 billion a year left over from his budget- and tax-cutting spree and would presumably use that to shrink the deficit. But to complete the job, Bush resorts to what amounts to smoke and mirrors: he calls for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, which would force more spending cuts and close the fiscal gap sometime in the late 1990s.
Bill Clinton’s center-left budget program is somewhat less expansive than those of traditional democratic candidates. But he has two traditional goals. Neither is deficit reduction. Clinton seeks a bigger government to create more social justice for cities, the young and the poor and for those lacking health insurance. His blizzard of program proposals ranges from creation of a new 100,000-person National Police Corps to national health insurance, government loans to any college student who applies, full funding of Head Start and other women’s and infants’ programs and total welfare reform. Clinton’s second goal is faster economic growth achieved through massive new government job-training programs, new technology and public-works spending, small-business and investment tax incentives and-you guessed it-middle-class tax cuts (a recent Clinton-Gore document claimed that these could be $15 billion a year, although his budget tabulation ignores this and the costs of several other programs).
Clinton says he can finance his entire wish list by eliminating waste and abuse in government and in the health-care industry-shades of Ronald Reagan. He would also cut defense and civilian spending elsewhere while imposing tax increases on the rich and on foreign corporations. Clinton’s claim that his program would simultaneously reduce the deficit by half within four years is dubious. Even on his own tainted mathematics, Clinton gets virtually all of his claimed deficit reduction by assuming that his borrow, tax and spend plan will prove to be a veritable elixir, whipping the moribund economy into an instant gallop that produces huge increases in taxable incomes and profits. Presto! Federal revenues soar, producing fully nine tenths of Clinton’s own claimed reduction in the deficit. Five presidents in a row have claimed such rosy scenarios for their budgets. As a result, the United States now has a $330 billion annual deficit, has an entire population hooked on getting $1 of government services for only 75 cents in taxes, and has family incomes growing hardly at all.
What each candidate says about the other’s program is essentially true. Bush and Clinton complain that Perot has put his deficit plan into a book but on his TV infomercials dodges discussing its unpopular details, such as his 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax. Perot’s program may also in fact attempt too much reduction too soon for the good of the economy. So, as he himself admitted the day after reentering the race, some of its tax hikes may have to be postponed. The costs of Clinton’s promises, as Bush particularly charges, are wildly undercounted in his budget tables, while his soak-the-rich revenues are overestimated. In essence, he claims’ to fit a circus fat lady of new programs into a size 6 revenue dress. As for Bush, his is a stealth budget. It is wholly lacking in details of his proposed giant cuts and is likely not to be passed by Congress once the details are known. With these shortcomings, budget policy in a Bush second term might well remain in the gridlock of the last four years.
The average young taxpaying family of four will labor in 1993 under a personal share in the $3.4 trillion national debt that equals $55,000. About $3,400 of the family’s annual IRS bill goes simply to meet interest on that debt. The debt itself rises by several thousand dollars each year, and interest costs rise apace. Unless Ross Perot, improbably, wins the election, the next president of the United States should not be counted on by anyone to be able to change the taxpayer’s plight.
