THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 15, 1995 TAG: 9505150122
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Heartening news from a three-day economic summit in Williamsburg where the Business Council, 100 chief executives of corporate giants, dealt with proposed tax cuts.
Most of 'em don't want 'em.
In a poll, a whopping majority of executives opposed a tax cut in the face of a monstrous national deficit that will fall due seven years hence.
Two-thirds said savings from budget cuts should go to reducing the deficit, with no tax cuts.
Just shy of a third wanted the savings to go into a mixture of deficit reduction and tax savings.
Only 2 percent wanted all the savings to go into tax cuts.
Appeals usually warn that if we don't reduce the $2 trillion deficit, our children's lives are at risk.
To fail to erase the deficit is like leaving toddlers with water wings under the advancing wall of a tsunami. (A Japanese word meaning ``harbor wave'' because when one rises from the sea it wrecks the thin rim of civilization ashore.)
The tsunami is a devious, creeping, deficit-like monster until it rears in its horrifying magnitude.
It originates when an earthquake shakes the mountain-deep troughs at the bottom of the ocean.
The Earth's tectonic plates shifting around beneath the sea from Alaska to South America send huge underwater waves heaving in concentric circles across the Pacific.
People in ships on the bosom of the tsunami sometimes don't realize the ocean's surface has been raised by the seismic upheaval; but as the tsunami reaches shallow depths along the coast, it lifts in an onrushing wedge of water towering 60 feet as it crashes, engulfing foothills.
Seismic instruments chart the tsunami just as signs of pending economic disaster trouble corporate heads. Politicians prating about cutting taxes are children with sand buckets in peril at the beach.
Forget tax cuts; grab the kids and run for high hills.
The CEOs also balked at extreme GOP cuts, including a proposal to abolish the Commerce Department.
``I think everyone here agrees that reducing the deficit will be a major factor in improving the economy,'' said Lawrence Bossidy, chairman of Allied Signal Inc. and vice chairman of the Business Council.
``But can you eliminate it by 2002 without hurting the economy? I don't know. And why would you start by eliminating Commerce?''
On NBC's ``Meet the Press'' Sunday, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., suggested both parties drop the idea of tax cuts and work together to balance the budget.
Told on CBS's ``Face the Nation'' of Dodd's offer, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said, ``OK, if there are no tax cuts, will you help us get to zero? Will you get a balanced budget?''
But House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, rebuffed Dodd. The debate on whether Congress can cut taxes and balance the budget, he said, ``is over.''
What's that long, grating roar down by the shore? by CNB