Deficit Reduction Needs Poster Child
My favorite fringe players at the Democratic National Convention weren’t the ones shouting from the official protest sites. My favorites were the better-dressed folks who used panel discussions, receptions and press conferences to talk about a problem that Bill Clinton pretends to have licked: deficits.
Deficit hawks see the deficit spending of the 1980s and 1990s as a multitrillion-dollar scam against future generations. That’s why they want to stop it cold, rather than cheer President Clinton for cutting the deficit in half, then quietly letting it increase next year. And they keep warning of a new fiscal crisis when baby boomers retire and go on Social Security and Medicare.
These nags are right, but nobody has paid much attention. Because they weren’t invited to spoil the Official Clinton Line in prime time, they peddled their ideas around the periphery. For example, young Democrats held a panel discussion on “Budgeting 101: Big Bird, Books or B-2 Bombers?” Only three dozen people showed up.
The non-partisan Concord Coalition, which trumpeted its anti-deficit militancy in full-page advertisements in The New York Times before both major-party conventions, held a quiet reception attended by a little more than 100 people. The mood was more sorrow than anger, mixed with hope of reviving fiscal sanity after the election.
Why do the deficit hawks, who were hot stuff a few years ago, have such a hard time drawing a crowd these days?
One reason is the nature of the issue itself. Bob Bixby, national field director of the Concord Coalition, put it simply: “There’s no poster child for deficit reduction.” In other words, an attack on school lunches is a tragedy; $5 trillion in IOUs is just a statistic.
One good attention-grabber is the coalition’s Debt Clock - a huge digital display that clocks the growing national debt. But it was in Iowa and Nebraska this week. Why not Chicago? Jamie Ridge, spokesman for the Concord Coalition, explained, “They (the Democrats) wouldn’t let us set it up anywhere near the convention.” (Neither would the Republicans in San Diego.)
On a rare occasion when a group of deficit hawks from the House of Representatives did hold a press conference under the Democratic Party’s auspices, it drew only a small number of reporters - and no TV cameras. Naturally, it had a pro-Clinton spin. One of the speakers knocked the Republican Congress for planning a deficit increase for 1997, which is correct. But nobody mentioned that Clinton had proposed the same thing. This week, that would be politically incorrect.
This deference toward Clinton, who is a reluctant deficit-cutter who cooked the books on his health-care plan, is more than simple partisanship. Democrats who are committed to balancing the budget are genuinely scared of Bob Dole now that he’s peddling tax cuts that would cost more than $90 billion a year. So, anti-deficit Democrats are soft-pedaling their reservations about Clinton in order not to hurt his re-election chances.
As former Rep. Tim Penny of Minnesota put it, “I don’t think the Democrats deserve to be hammered on it when the Republicans basically abandoned the issue.”
A serious postelection attack on the deficit would save billions in entitlements and defense. It also would forgo the tax cuts that both parties are eager to hand out. It might even raise the gasoline tax - a part of Ross Perot’s 1992 platform that he no longer has the courage to talk about. But serious medicine was unmentionable at the Chicago convention and probably will get short shrift this fall.
It’s a shame. Unlike Ronald Reagan, this year’s presidential candidates actually understand this stuff. As one deficit hawk put it, Clinton, Dole and Perot could sit in a room and solve the problem in a few hours if they wanted to. But the political show must go on, so they won’t even talk about the issue with total honesty.
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