Congress’ Budget Cuts Unbalanced

It is truly an amazing feat: Congress has hammered out deep spending cuts, designed to balance the federal budget within seven years.

What’s even more amazing is that Congress chose to do it the hard way. Some details of its plan offend any reasonable definition of fairness. All of us know that deficits must come down. Yet the details bring discredit upon the effort.

As a result, Congress and the president are loading political revolvers for a high-stakes financial shootout. Maybe that serves partisan purposes on both sides but it doesn’t serve the public.

All Americans should share in the pain of bringing the budget into balance. While pain should be a given, unfairness, irresponsibility and political games shouldn’t be. But consider:

Unfairness. Republican leaders exempted defense spending from cuts. Sure, defense must remain strong. But the Pentagon’s huge budget, its obvious departmental redundancies, its record of waste and rigidity and its downsized mission all make it a prime target in any fair-minded search for efficiencies.

Given the need to reform the nation’s social safety net, pain among our nation’s poor and sick was inevitable. But the Republicans took unnecessary shots at the poor, and dispensed unnecessary favors to the rich. Reductions in the Earned Income Tax Credit, a program President Reagan praised, mean a tax increase for the poor. That’s obscene when it’s coupled with tax breaks for upper income Americans, including a cut in the capital gains tax and the extension of a $500-per-child tax credit to families with incomes of up to $200,000 per year.

Meanwhile, Congress declined to take a hard look at welfare to corporations - subsidies and tax breaks built up over years of special-interest lobbying.

These glaring inequities give President Clinton good reason to threaten vetoes and demand compromises in the weeks to come.

Irresponsibility. Federal debt is not the only measure of the nation’s long-term well-being. The environment’s an asset as well. When harmed, it takes decades to recover. Republicans increased opposition to deficit-cutting bills by making them a vehicle for assaults on environmental treasures. Examples include provisos to ram through an aggressive logging plan for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. This, in spite of concerns that Tongass logging costs taxpayers more than it brings in, and turns old-growth spruce forests, home to fragile salmon spawning grounds, into pulp for diapers and log exports for Japan.

Political games. Republicans missed their own deadlines for timely preparation of deficit-reduction bills, partly because they could not resist festooning them with hot-button amendments that should have been considered separately and on their own merits. For example: An assortment of abortion bans, an attempt to gag political advocacy by non-profit groups, limiting rights of death-row inmates, the elimination of the Commerce Department …

Certainly, the federal debt is a menace larger than any of the issues that have been linked to it. But a job this important, and this painful, ought to be done with fairness, vision and dignity.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board