Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992:wq! TAG: 9202100194
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WHY, YES, WE'RE AWASH IN RED INK
SHOULD ONE applaud or boo the White House admission that the flow of federal red ink cannot be stanched by its policies existing or proposed?The Bush administration sees nothing but deficits of about $200 billion a year as far as 1997. The president "wants to tell it like it is," says his economic adviser, Michael Boskin. Facing up to reality is good, even if that carries an implicit acknowledgement that our leader has not been telling it like it is.
Of course, neither Bush nor his Republican predecessor - both self-described conservatives - have ever submitted a balanced budget, notwithstanding both presidents' efforts to shift blame onto Congress.
Now we have new candor, but there is still the deficit itself to consider. Will giving up the pretense of budget-balancing diminish the pressure to limit deficit spending?
It might. Pretense hasn't entirely disappeared from Washington, and the pressure to reduce deficits has always been rather weak.
If the White House were even more frank about the deficits, and the huge federal debt, it would admit that the government - executive and legislative - is unwilling to stop spending far more than it takes in. That would mean asking voters to stop heaping debt on their children, stop squandering the patrimony of future generations.
In little more than a decade, the federal debt has tripled; it is rapidly mounting toward $4 trillion, and little is being done to halt the increase, which runs at a billion dollars or so a day. The added debt in 1992 alone will amount to more than $5,000 per household.
Nobody talks about reducing that debt; we pay only the interest. That's an entitlement program too - we must put up whatever funds are needed to service the debt - and interest is now the second largest item in the federal budget. It takes an amount equal to every federal tax dollar from every state west of the Mississippi, and that outlay (some $200 billion a year) doesn't buy a single warplane, pave one mile of road, maintain any forest, keep one Medicare patient alive.
What it does do is exert a powerful drag on the economy, one that the government can't ease by still more deficit spending. This stimulant is losing its kick.
The other problem has to do not with economics, but with ourselves. Yes, the feds are profligate and irresponsible. But who lets them go on that way? Shall we take a collective look in the mirror? How often are politicians rewarded for real, as opposed to affected, fiscal responsibility?
The American people were lulled by a promise 11 years ago that big tax cuts would balance the federal budget within three years, despite unprecedented spending on the military. The result was unprecedented deficits that the economy can't outgrow. But a lot of us, in effect, used the borrowed money to throw ourselves a big party. The piper's being paid, only in a different and more painful coin than taxes.