Another Budget Flop

House and Senate Republicans last month rejected President Clinton’s 2001 budget proposal out of hand, calling it unrealistic and fiscally imprudent. Wednesday, they unveiled their own budget proposal, one that’s equally unrealistic. The arithmetic strains credulity and demands that the two sides seek a compromise.

Congressional Republicans offer a five-year budget plan that calls for tax cuts smaller than those advocated by GOP presidential front-runner George W. Bush. But when the figures are added up, the Republican cut is nearly as big as the one rejected by Clinton last year. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which does independent analyses of federal spending, estimates that the Republican cut would consume the entire projected non-Social Security budget surplus and possibly more. The figure would balloon if the tax cuts rose after the five-year period, as some critic predict. Under this plan, the country might well have to revert to deficit spending even if bountiful tax revenues continued to pour in.

The GOP plan would increase defense spending over the next five years by some $25 billion, on top of adjustments for inflation. It also creates a new $40-billion, limited Medicare prescription drug program and calls for a funding increase of $6 billion for farmers and of $7 billion for the federal crop insurance program.

How to pay for all this? The GOP proposes cutting $135 billion from nondefense discretionary spending over the next five years. This would require spending discipline that Congress--whether controlled by the Republicans, as it is now, or the Democrats--has failed to demonstrate. Over the last decade, nondiscretionary spending grew about 20% while the legislators were promising to reduce government expenditures.

In 1997, Congress set spending caps and has exceeded them every year since, in part by pushing billions of dollars in military pay and other costs from one year to the next.

Clinton, unlike the Republicans, at least stopped pretending that the spending limits still existed and proposed a 7% spending boost for fiscal 2001.

The difficult task of translating the $135-billion spending cut into real line-by-line budget reductions is still ahead. It is virtually certain that the Republicans will fail to agree even among themselves on specific cuts--especially in an election year--and, even if they do agree, Clinton will probably veto some of the proposed reductions.

Clearly, balancing the budget even in these fat years is an illusive process, and both Republicans and Democrats will have to make tough choices whatever the political cost. The books tell the story.