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Thursday, March 01, 2001
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- If the devil is in the details, President Bush's $1.96 trillion budget blueprint is heavenly. It's only 207 pages and short on all those pesky numbers that reveal what spending cuts he intends to seek from Congress.
White House budget director Mitch Daniels said a more detailed budget would be presented to Congress in April and pointed out that yesterday's version was "one-third longer" than the one proposed by President Bill Clinton after his first month in office. Daniels said readers of the budget would nonetheless "understand the mind of this president."
Bush's "blueprint for new beginnings" has these goals: "Pay down the federal debt, provide tax relief, strengthen and reform education, modernize and reform Social Security and Medicare, revitalize national defense and champion compassionate conservatism."
On Capitol Hill, the reaction was, "Now comes the hard part."
Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said the budget proposal was "sheer madness." Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., called it a "fantasy." Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota called it a "shell game."
Most Republicans, on the other hand, lavished praise on it.
Democrats immediately charged that 43 percent of the centerpiece $1.6 trillion tax cut would go to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. They said they didn't believe that Bush could deliver all the tax cuts he has promised, from doubling the child credit, to eliminating 6 million families from the tax rolls, to phasing out the estate tax, without running up the total to $2.5 trillion.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said that was "nonsense." He said Democrats didn't understand that the $5.6 trillion surplus projected over the next decade was the "people's money" and that giving one-fourth of the surplus back to those who paid it was fair. He said the $1.6 trillion figure was firm, which probably means a slower "phase-in" of some cuts.
The basic problem for Bush in selling his tax cut is that there is no guarantee that the $5.6 trillion will materialize if the economy deteriorates and if a broad tax cut fails to produce more growth. The country is not now in recession, but consumer confidence is sinking each month and many economists say the economy will get worse before it gets better.
But Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan's idea of a "trigger" to stop the tax cuts if the surplus doesn't pile up as expected is not popular in the White House or on Capitol Hill.
Another problem for Bush is that unless Americans start clamoring for a tax cut (22 percent say it's a top priority now), he needs to convince Americans that it is possible to provide Social Security and Medicare benefits when the baby boomer population retires, provide the tax cut, provide for emergencies, pay for a national missile defense shield, improve the nation's schools, provide for prescription drug coverage and health coverage for everyone and pay down two-thirds of the national debt -- all at once.
Tucked in the small print of the budget are cuts that will be hard to carry out on Capitol Hill because they will be unpopular. Not surprisingly, Bush did not mention them when he addressed both houses of Congress Tuesday night before heading to Pennsylvania, Iowa, Nebraska, Arkansas and Georgia to try to convince Americans he was on the right road.
The White House argues that Bush's budget does not cut spending because discretionary spending -- about $650 billion a year -- rises 4 percent instead of last year's 8 percent.
But some programs take a direct hit, especially in the Departments of Transportation, Energy, Interior, Justice and Agriculture, from farm assistance to renewable energy research to integrating the health care delivery system to fewer subsidies for flood insurance. Altogether, there were 6,000 "line-item" programs that were in last year's budget that Bush does not want to fund this year but they were hard to pinpoint in the "blueprint" published yesterday.
Daniels said yesterday, "We did find a few programs that had run their due course." But when asked to be specific, he declined.