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Contra Costa Times

June 2, 2002 Sunday

SECTION: P; Pg. 9

Guns and butter leave a nasty taste

by Robert Reno COMMENTARY

IF IT WERE as easy as determining which major party is most likely to spend the nation into bankruptcy, most voters could go to the polls every two years with easy choices to make.

For most of the 20th Century, it was a case of picking which party would spend generously enough, but not too much, to meet the nation's needs, and which would maintain the sort of fiscal discipline necessary to keep the economy from overheating and crashing in nasty recession.

Normally, Democrats have tended to benefit from the former inclination while Republicans have prospered when voters were more worried about deficits.

As the United States enters a new period of ongoing budget deficits, these generalities are being stood on their head for the third time in two decades. The first occurred when Ronald Reagan took office promising to cut taxes and balance the budget by 1984. He basically trashed a century of conservative Republican fiscal orthodoxy and made it seem as easy as kicking in a rotted door. The result of his supposedly "self financing" tax cuts was a hemorrhage of deficits that didn't prevent his re-election in 1984 but did make grief for his successor. George Bush found himself in a recession that cinched the election of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992. Bush squandered the approval ratings that only a year earlier had made him the happy warrior of the Persian Gulf War.

Whatever his lack of personal discipline, Clinton shrewdly seized the notion of fiscal discipline and made it the watchword of an administration that balanced the budget for the first time in 29 years. In a fast forward to 2002, the nation is now slipping back into the deficit column. In a single year, the federal government has exchanged a $127 billion surplus for a deficit that is likely to exceed $100 billion.

George W. Bush argues that the stimulative effects of his tax cuts will return the budget to surplus by 2004. This requires a great leap of faith because the full effects of his tax cuts, which, just like Reagan's, were geared to the rich, are stretched out over much of the next decade. Given the uncertainties that accompany all long-term budget forecasts -- they're basically wild guesses -- they could as result in the same monster deficits that plagued Ronald Reagan and sank the first George Bush.

Meanwhile, federal spending is proceeding as if we were still wallowing in surpluses. The president didn't seem to even swallow hard when he signed a $190 billion farm bill that is unconscionably expensive. As raids on the Treasury go, it was pulled off with great finesse by farm-state congressmen with sense enough to know that the bucolic life has always had a fascination to people who don't know how to milk a cow.

Next to the farm bill, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's sensible cancellation of the Crusader artillery system will save peanuts even as friends of the Crusader in Congress have vowed to cram it down Rumsfeld's throat. In any event, a tactful Rumsfeld would have had to rename Crusader to conform with the sensibilities of Muslims in the oil-rich Middle East who remember crusaders as a bunch of bloodthirsty Christian invaders.

And sitting out there on an ice floe is a Social Security system that, whether Bush manages to privatize even part of it, will be a costly claim on the Treasury later in this century. The locked box that supposedly protects it looks more like chicken wire, the kind that's fine for containing fowl but ineffective against the prowling beasts of Wall Street who salivate to get their hands on Social Security's trust funds. If Social Security had been privatized, we can only guess how many widows might have been seduced by Enron's promises of limitless profits and effortless appreciation.

Fortunately, the old darlings weren't tested.

Reno is a columnist for Newsday.