Avoiding the Issues

"WE have more will than wallet," President George Bush told the nation in his inaugural address last month. But last week, in unveiling his $1.2 trillion budget proposal before a joint session of Congress, Bush exhibited less of the former and more of the latter.

Bush argues that his budget proposal will reduce next year's national budget deficit to $91.1 billion. Unfortunately, how the new president will bring the deficit down by over $70 billion during the next year remains a mystery. The expanding economy will lead to increased revenue in the coming year, but not enough to decrease the deficit as much as Bush has claimed. Bush has essentially left the politically unpopular task of deciding specific cuts up to Congress.

THERE are many points in the new budget which seem admirable, but they are piecemeal measures, which do not indicate any real programs for combatting the large domestic problems this country faces. Bush does call for nearly $5.5 billion to combat the nation's drug crisis--almost $1 billion more than was spent this year--and he has agreed to fully fund programs for aid to the homeless as legislated by Congress. In an effort to improve America's economic "competitiveness," the plan would also target more research money to the National Science Foundation and make permanent the investment tax credit.

However, beneath the "kinder, gentler" rhetoric that prevailed in the president's Thursday night address lies a budget whose priorities seem out of whack. While the Bush budget completely freezes spending on many existing economic programs, it allows for an increase in defense spending to keep pace with inflation.

IN fact, Bush has the equation wrong. The United States clearly must finance the investments in productivity and human resources that the President seeks-it simply lacks the will to do so. Adhering to his "read my lips" campaign pledge, Bush adamantly refuses to consider a tax increase or even a value-added tax on consumption, or to tax costly, non-means based entitlement programs like Social Security for the wealthy. He also refuses to consider putting a lid on popular tax breaks for the middle-class, such as mortgage-interest deductions.

Bush's only major proposal for bringing in new revenue, cutting in half the tax rate on capital gains, is simply a rerun of the more disastrous provisions of the 1981 Reagan tax cut, which failed to promote the surge in savings and investment that supply-siders claimed it would.

Basing a deficit-reduction plan on the tried-and-failed notion that tax breaks for the wealthy, not specifically targeted for research and development, will spark renewed economic transactions and thereby bring in new revenue to the government seems, at best, dubious economic policy.

In short, for all its commendable aims, the Bush budget proposal has failed to specify how it will reduce the deficit. He has not proposed any of the most accepted methods of cutting the budget deficit: increasing taxes or cutting Social Security or defense spending. It is not enough for Bush merely to summon the nation to a "mission of goodness and greatness."

As Senate Budget Committee Chair James Sasser (D-Tn.) said, "Overall the budget does not meet the rigorous economic demands of this moment in history." By putting off the tough choices that must be made to reduce the deficit, President Bush has merely jeopardized his own priorities for the future.