See The Budget For A True Fund Scandal

Put your money on Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. I am naming the one member of Congress who we can be perfectly certain has never made a fund-raising call from her office in the U.S. Capitol. We can be sure because Kay Bailey has already been indicted on charges of using state phones for political purposes, so she knows better. She’s too smart to do it again.

Scholars will recall that the case against Hutchison was thrown out of court because it was generally silly. Naturally, all the citizens who rushed to defend her at the time of her unseemly indictment will now rush to the defense of Veep Al Gore. Right?

Gore could also use a private line to call Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, who would then call back on his very own NON-state telephone (Mauro had a little legal problem with this matter himself not long ago) to discuss the affair. They could then patch a conference call through to Texas Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, who in his turn ran into some problems after using state employees to update an index file allegedly used for political purposes (this was before computers, children - that’s how long Bullock has been around).

In fact, members of the Washington press corps, who appear to be born-again virgins one and all, might usefully take a field trip to Texas to study just how sticky a wicket all this separation of politics from holding office can be. District Attorney Ronnie Earle of Travis County, the one so rudely ejected from the courthouse after indicting Hutchison, will be happy to help them. They will learn that all the officeholders accused of this particular brand of misconduct were subsequently re-elected by the people of our state. Some dogs just won’t hunt, y’know.

Meanwhile, since the rest of the press corps is tied up with the Lincoln Bedroom and Gore’s phone calls, let’s just check in on how the nation is being governed; no one else seems to be paying any attention to it. Congress has agreed to work from President Clinton’s proposed budget, planning to embellish it only with a few goodies for the rich, such as an inheritance tax cut and a capital gains tax cut. This budget:

1. Puts one-third more money into buying new weapons for the Pentagon than will be spent on all of Clinton’s new education initiatives if Congress accepts them.

2. Puts less money, as a percentage of the gross domestic product or as a percentage of federal spending, into public investment - roads, schools, bridges, R&D, education and training - than did George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter or Gerry Ford.

3. Spends more on Star Wars in one year than will be spent to create new jobs for poor mothers over five years.

The Nation magazine points out three fundamental choices made in this budget. The first is the fixation on balancing the budget by 2002. “With deficits as low as they are, this offers little economic benefit and does nothing to address the long-term fiscal crisis posed primarily by spiraling health care costs,” observed The Nation.

The second choice is to provide middle-class tax cuts; Clinton tried to link the cuts to children, education and home ownership, but to quote The Nation again, “the result is an erosion of the tax base in the least-taxed country in the industrial world.”

And the third choice is to continue military spending at Cold War levels.

The Economic Policy Institute has proposed an alternative budget written by Max Sawicky that would yield dramatically different results. “Forget the 2002 deadline, and instead, stabilize the debt at 49 percent of the GDP, a level lower than that of any other industrial nation. Adopt a plan put forth by the centrist Brookings Institution to restructure military spending. Forget tax breaks for the middle class, and instead, sustain federal revenues at last year’s level of GDP (19 percent). These strategies would yield $450 billion to spend on public investment over the next five years, and more than $900 billion over the next 10 years.

“Now, $90 billion a year would be sufficient to take real action in medical care and Head Start, public schools, rebuilding our cities, even spending the additional $12 billion a year on worker training and education former Labor Secretary Robert Reich argues is essential in the wake of welfare reform.”

The amazing thing about people and taxes is that we don’t mind paying them so much when we can see the money doing good in our lives and our communities. As a nation, we are about to commit the Dolph Briscoe Fallacy, named after a former Texas guv: When times are good, do nothing.

Inevitably, the economy will eventually shrink again, international crises will come to menace us and we will have no money for public investment. Of all the stupid times to cut back on investment in people, research and infrastructure. Of all the stupid times to allow the gap between rich and poor to grow wider. Of all the stupid ways to govern. It’s almost as serious as Al Gore’s phone calls.

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