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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (29118)	1/22/1999 9:48:00 AM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 67261

What do Reagan and Clinton have in common. Deficits - If he gets what he wants. washtimes.com Clinton's numbers don't crunch without creating a new deficit By Bill Sammon THE WASHINGTON TIMES President Clinton's State of the Union address contained initiatives that, if enacted, would increase federal spending by 20 percent, or $288 billion a year, according to an analysis by a taxpayer watchdog group. That would wipe out the entire budget surplus and create a $100 billion deficit in the plan's first year alone, said Tom McClusky of the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation, which performed the analysis. "He's trying to please everybody, but he'll only make people happy until they realize they're going to pay for all of these proposals," Mr. McClusky said. "An across-the-board tax cut would let people decide how to spend the money." Mr. Clinton, who has steadfastly resisted Republican calls for broad tax cuts, instead pledged to spend virtually the entire budget surplus for the next 15 years, estimated at $4 trillion, on initiatives laid out in Tuesday's address. White House Deputy Press Secretary Barry Toiv said the analysts who performed the study "clearly don't understand the president's proposal. If they did, they'd realize that his plan for the surplus is the most fiscally responsible policy that we've seen in this town for years because it would result in an extraordinary reduction in the amount of borrowing by the federal government." But other taxpayer watchdog groups agreed that Mr. Clinton proposed a spending spree of monumental proportions. "The mask of the New Democrat fell off as he spoke and he stood before the American people as a tax-and-spend, big-government politician," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. "He lashed himself to the mast of the big-government liberals, saying: 'If I sink, you sink. We're all in this together. Let's get past the shoals of the next two years.'" Mr. Norquist said Mr. Clinton's magnanimity was a thinly veiled attempt to buy Senate votes in his impeachment trial. "It was Al Capone standing up there and bribing the jury: 'All right, everybody in the audience, I'll give you a billion each if I get out of here alive. Now you go vote on whether or not you're going to trip me up.'" Chris Varvares, president of Macroeconomic Advisers, a St. Louis consulting firm, cautioned that some of Mr. Clinton's initiatives with the biggest price tags, including a $2.7 trillion bailout of Social Security, can be considered debt reduction, not expenditures. He also pointed out that few presidents expect the bulk of their proposals to actually come to fruition. "The chances that a large part of that gets implemented are virtually nil," Mr. Varvares said. "The chance that Congress can swallow them all and process them all and develop detailed legislation that passes in any reasonable amount of time is quite small. "This really was a wish list or menu of proposals, rather than a list of things that they expect could be actually implemented -- even if Congress wanted to go along with it." Still, the sheer dollar value of proposals staggered many observers. It was the most expensive package since Mr. Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address, when he proposed nationalized health care. This time around, Mr. Clinton promised money for everything from Medicare and government-controlled savings accounts to adult literacy and anti-terrorism programs. "It was scary," said one Washington economist who asked not to be named. "It was a scary performance. One of his campaign themes has been personal responsibility. Now he's saying that while personal responsibility is good, the federal government will take over if you can't handle it. "I mean, I consider myself a liberal and I thought it was scary," the economist said. "The president declared the federal candy store open," said Pete Sepp, vice president of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. "Instead of returning to taxpayers their overpayments with an across-the-board tax cut, he has proposed pie-in-the-sky legislation. Unfortunately, even if only a slice of that pie gets enacted, it represents a major increase in federal spending." The foundation based its study on White House press briefings, data from a White House World Wide Web site and by matching Mr. Clinton's proposals with legislative equivalents drafted in the previous Congress.