Budget Battle Is A Great Thing

Going into a national swoon is what Americans do best.

Whether it’s the O.J. Simpson verdict or daytime talk shows, Americans’ capacity for overreaction is as infinite as their willingness to imagine a crisis.

Stimulate them, and Americans can convince themselves that the war to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy was a great patriotic Armageddon fought to preserve our way of life, or that Ross Perot has something about him besides his money that ought to be taken seriously, or that we’re all in peril of being bumped off even though the murder rate is lower than it was 20 years ago.

The budget stalemate and the shutdown of the federal bureaucracy are no different in the reactions they have provoked. Polls show a large percentage of people blame the Republicans, a smaller percentage blame the Democrats and a huge percentage think it’s an ungodly mess. The bovine media handwringers have joined in the chant about leaders of both parties being infantile and petulant and failing to govern the nation properly.

What rubbish. Never, since President Harding established the concept of a budget in 1921, has the budget process worked better. Never have national priorities been debated with greater clarity. Never have the traditional fiscal myths been better exposed - such as, the myth that you can balance the budget, cut taxes and not butcher the government programs that enjoy the highest popularity among voters. Never have the two parties been forced to make coherent stands more accurately reflecting their core philosophies.

The delay in approving a budget and the intensity, not to say savagery, of the debate have caused the public to become aware of budget nuances that formerly went unnoticed. At the heart of the credibility of any federal budget, for instance, has always been its “economic assumptions,” chiefly the projected rate of future economic growth that can vary widely and that critically affects revenues. Former President Reagan’s early budgets “assumed” tax cuts for the rich would so stimulate growth and revenues that the budget would be balanced by 1984, a disastrous miscalculation - or perhaps a calculated disaster - that led to the level of deficits that has forced the present confrontation.

This year, for the first time, economic assumptions have been seriously debated. Whether to use assumptions of the White House or of the Congressional Budget Office became central to a solution of the deadlock. This is a great leap from 1981, when Congress closed its eyes, accepted Reagan’s assumptions, and unconscionably overmortgaged a nation by $4 trillion.

Raucous as it is, this year’s debate is on a far higher level. And I can’t help feeling that Newt Gingrich, for all his atrocious manners and hypersensitivity to insult, has been mistreated. In a USA Today/CNN poll, 64 percent of respondents disapproved of the way he has handled the budget confrontation. A smaller majority also trashed Bob Dole’s performance.

This overlooks their immense contribution in drawing the battle lines more starkly so the public could make informed judgments about the budget. And it has. Virtually every poll shows that when voters are given a clear choice on national priorities, they want a milder, more gradual solution to the problems created by the Republicans in 1981 than the Republicans are offering in 1995.

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