Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 17, 1995 TAG: 9503170043
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The House voted 227-200 for a GOP plan slicing $17 billion out of already enacted programs, including public housing, summer jobs for youth, and aid for the arts and public broadcasting. The cuts were the first the House has cleared in the Republican campaign to balance the budget.
The White House noted the occasion with a political swipe at recent GOP budget cuts and a veto threat.
``Everybody's for cutting government, but I think there's a real difference between closing 1,200 offices and cutting back on food stamps,'' President Clinton told a meeting of state legislators.
``There is no question that if the bill is in its present form, the president would veto it,'' Clinton's chief of staff, Leon Panetta, told reporters. He called the reductions ``irresponsible and mean-spirited.''
Besides its spending cuts, the bill would provide $5.4 billion to help 40 states recover from recent natural disasters.
Shortly afterward, the GOP muscled a plan through the budget panel that would make another $100 billion in reductions over the next five years to help pay for the Republican tax-cut package. The vote was 24-11, and like the House roll call, it was nearly party-line.
The $100 billion in cuts would be in overall discretionary spending, which covers one-third of the $1.5 trillion budget, including defense, foreign aid and domestic programs, but not benefit programs such as Medicare. Decisions about which specific programs would be trimmed were to be made later this year.
Nonetheless, the committee voted to recommend cuts in more than 140 programs to achieve the savings, including reductions in job training programs, subsidies paid to some corporations and foreign aid.
The votes were almost drowned out by a raucous, finger-pointing row between the parties over whether Republicans had attracted conservative Democratic support for their spending cuts with a promise they later abandoned.
In exchange for conservative Democrats' votes for the $17 billion package of cuts, Republicans said they had agreed they would use the bill's immediate savings for deficit reduction. Savings that the measure would create in future years could be used for a tax cut, they said.
But Democrats said the agreement called for the use of all the bill's savings, now and in the future, to reduce the deficit.
Republicans refused to do that. And Democrats angrily charged that Republicans were not only abandoning a deal, but were counting some cuts twice: once in the $17 billion package, and again in the $100 billion plan the Budget Committee approved.
``I would say in the 26 years I've been in Congress, I have never seen a more duplicitous series of events on major budget matters than we've seen in the last three days,'' said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis.
The dispute raised questions about future cooperation between Republicans and conservative Democrats, an alliance the GOP may need all year as it tries to slice hundreds of billions of dollars from the budget.
Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, said the reductions would shrink an excessively large government and return tax dollars to Americans.
``When you actually cut spending, good things happen,'' he said.``Any misunderstanding was totally inadvertent,'' said Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. ``I hope it will not produce any unnecessary conflict ... between the parties.''
The Budget Committee's $100 billion in cuts was to pay for part of the tax cut legislation moving through the House. The tax cut would cost $189 billion over five years.
To pay for the rest of the revenues lost by the tax cuts, Kasich said savings would come from spending cuts approved by other House committees. These include reductions of $65 billion in welfare, food stamps and school lunches, and cuts in civil service retirement payments and other programs.
On top of the $100 billion his panel approved, Kasich said that because of the way Congress' official budget scorekeepers calculate savings, his package of cuts would produce an extra $91 billion in savings for reducing the deficit. Those extra savings come from comparing his cuts to the amounts by which the affected programs would otherwise have grown to stay even with inflation.
by CNB