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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (27516)	2/2/2004 9:41:55 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793698

Post Editorial What It Takes Monday, February 2, 2004; Page A16 WITH THE BUSH administration preparing to release its 2005 budget today, consider this question: What would it take to get the federal budget back into balance over the next 10 years? Mr. Bush and his advisers, like hucksters peddling a miracle diet, pretend that an elixir combining even more tax cuts with a dollop of spending discipline will get the deficit under control. The reality, detailed in a new study from the Brookings Institution, is that there is no easy road to balance, no matter your view about the proper size and role of the federal government. The Brookings study, "Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget," offers examples of small-government, big-government, and "better government" paths to balance. What's striking is that all three paths entail, as the authors put it, "tough choices that are sure to be unpopular." To read the study is to be reminded not only of the enormity of the deficit problem but the political land mines embedded in any serious effort to address it. Assume, to begin, that Congress makes the Bush tax cuts permanent, as the president demands, and increases spending only enough to keep up with inflation and population growth -- that is, at a far slower rate than either Mr. Bush or Congress has advocated in recent years. The annual deficit in 2014 would be $687 billion, though even that understates the bad news, since it counts the surplus in federal retirement accounts toward the general budget. If you set that surplus aside -- remember the lockbox? -- the deficit would top $1 trillion. The Brookings report, edited by Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill, takes the smaller deficit figure as its challenge. Balancing the budget would save about $153 billion in interest costs, leaving a $534 billion gap to be made up by cutting spending or raising taxes. How to get there? The smaller-government plan entails cuts of a magnitude unthinkable to even the most conservative members of Congress. It would wipe out all federal spending for elementary and secondary education, for housing and urban development, for environmental protection and for state and local law enforcement -- and even then would require $134 billion in new taxes to achieve balance. The bigger-government plan considers new spending programs along the lines of those discussed by the Democratic presidential candidates for health care, preschool, special education and college tuition. It would require not only undoing all the Bush tax cuts but also collecting significant additional revenue, for a whopping $629 billion in new taxes. Even the Brookings proposal for a "better government" plan demonstrates the daunting nature of the budget-balancing task. It provides for new spending targeted to children and the poor; cuts $175 billion in current spending, including politically entrenched programs like farm subsidies and manned space flight; and still requires some $400 billion in tax increases. One can argue that the study misses potential savings in this category or that, but the overall point is irrefutable: Getting the budget back in balance will be painful. It can't be done through spending cuts alone. And it will require far more fiscal realism than the president will display today, and far more political fortitude than Congress has shown in recent years.