
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 8, 1994                   TAG: 9409020015
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

ENTITLEMENTS

THE CENTRAL point of the draft report of the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform is nothing new: Entitlement spending and debt service - not the cost of government operations - are what's eating up the federal budget and threatening the nation's fiscal soundness.

Even so, the lesson is worth repeating over and over, because its unpleasantness makes it such a hard one to learn.

The draft, issued Thursday, projects that by the year 2012 entitlements and debt service (in a sense, also an entitlement program) will eat up every tax dollar collected - leaving nothing for, say, national parks or the defense of the country.

The specific numbers may be open to argument, but few serious students of fiscal policy would dispute the trend.

Can that trend be reversed? Sure.

Declining deficits during the first 18 months of the Clinton presidency have marked progress of sorts; without the declines, the outlook would be even worse. But as the report makes clear, that isn't nearly enough.

Meeting the challenge will require a political class less prone to pandering. It also will require a public less inclined to squawk about any reduction in entitlement benefits, and about every proposal to raise taxes to pay for the spending that's demanded.

by CNB