Newsday (New York, NY)

April 9, 2002 Tuesday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg. A31

Watch Out: Congress Wants to Get Out of Debt Free

by MARIE COCCO; Marie Cocco's e-mail address is cocco@newsday;com

WHEN THEY start dickering over the debt limit, it's time to start worrying. It's not the million here or the billion there. It's the brazen budget fraud that these debt-limit debates cover up.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has started juggling the government's books, temporarily shifting money out of federal employees' retirement funds to free up cash for general spending. That's because the government cannot borrow what it needs to keep running. It has hit the debt ceiling. And that is because the House Republicans - fiscal conservatives, you know - could not bring themselves to raise the limit of $5.9 trillion before Congress left for spring break. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) must, on this week's return, convince a core of conservatives to go along. They won office by complaining about Democrats' contemptible profligacy and fiscal incompetence. Now they must accede to a Republican president's fiscal incompetence and contemptible profligacy.

The leaders will eventually slip the debt measure into an irresistible slice of political pie so it passes. That will be the maneuver. It is not to be confused with a solution.

There is, in fact, no solution in sight to Washington's worsening budget crisis and no hint of efforts to reach one. This is the dangerous deception the debt-limit charade covers up.

The capital is frozen in an ideological impasse over how - or even whether - to balance out how much it spends with how much it taxes. The president believes there is no greater good than cutting taxes, even when he says money is needed to combat terrorism at home, wage war abroad and perhaps even keep the old people from going without their food so they don't have to go without their medicine.

Senate Democrats gripe about the tax cut's undeniable role in the descent into a new era of deficits. The Congressional Budget Office now forecasts shortfalls in the budget outside of Social Security for most of the decade.

The Democrats have not the votes to repeal, or even freeze, the tax cut so the future does not get worse.

They refuse, even, to take their case to the public. It is possible, after all, that voters might punish them for speaking the truth: that you can't have your prescription drug coverage and your school funding and your airport security and your immigration enforcement and your war without paying for them.

House Republicans haven't the votes to lift the debt ceiling. Nonetheless, they had plenty to pass a budget that envisions billions more in tax cuts down the road. The cost is hidden with accounting tricks to keep them off the books. Theirs is the Enron theory of budgeting.

There are times we go through these contortions. In the past, major increases in the debt limit have been accompanied by the recognition that perhaps lawmakers have some duty to try keeping budget deficits, and thus debt - and the interest for which taxpayers are billed - in check.

That was true in 1985, and again in 1990 and again in 1993 and again in 1997. Each of those debt-ceiling crises was resolved, in the end, by coupling the increase in the debt limit with a larger measure aimed at shrinking future deficits. Lawmakers dared vote for the emblem of their bad behavior only when they promised, at the very same time, to do better. And sometimes they did.

"The problem right now is that nobody seems to have a goal that they want to achieve," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group founded a decade ago, during the last era of deficits that seemed endless. "Sept. 11 sort of gave them a 'get-out-of- jail-free' card as far as the budget is concerned."

Just a year ago, there was a great tempest over whether we should use fat budget surpluses to shrink the national debt - to nothing, if possible. The idea was to cut down the amount of money spent on interest payments and so do for the federal government what financial advisers say consumers should do for themselves. Republicans, led by the Bush administration, argued that utter disaster might befall us if the debt shrank to zero and the feds were forced to buy corporate assets with all that extra cash. Better, the administration argued, to enact its big tax cut than to even suggest such a positively socialistic possibility.

That was before the surplus disappeared and they got out of jail free. Free for them, anyway. But not for us.