Here they go again, as Ronald Reagan used to say.
Sniffing a big year at the ballot box, congressional Republicans have gotten together with their pollsters, notably an influential young Virginian named Frank Luntz, and slapped together a program of dreamy tax cuts, unspecified budget promises and high-sounding political reforms they believe will attract disaffected voters.
Something for nothing and simple answers to tough questions always draw a crowd, although you’d think the public would be a tad skeptical of turning the economy back to a group that put the country $3.5 trillion in debt in the last decade.
Unabashed and unbowed, the Republicans were out there last week, exhibiting their collection of Senate candidates at a news conference and pledging capital-gains tax cuts, a tax break for more affluent Social Security recipients and a crowd-pleasing doubling of the income tax exemption for children.
More defense spending? Sure. Hands off entitlements such as Social Security? Absolutely. The deficit? Hey, we haven’t seen much of Ross Perot lately, and, besides, that’s Bill Clinton’s problem.
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As candidates spoke, Republican staffers circulated a sheet estimating the GOP promises would raise the deficit by $175 billion. And the offset, Republicans said, would come in the form of $400 billion in spending cuts.
Not one cut was specified, of course, this being a GOP campaign event.
Tuesday, several hundred GOP incumbents and challengers will gather again in pious assembly to offer a “contract” with American voters, a 10-point plan that will spell out what a Republican-controlled Congress would seek to enact in its first 100 days.
The “contract” calls for a balanced budget amendment, a line-item veto, some anti-crime measures and an economy-sized dollop of supply-side economics, complete with tax cuts.
Sounds great. But where will the money come from? Farm subsidies? Medicare? The welfare program for ranchers being run by the federal government in the Mountain Time Zone?
To reach a balanced budget in five years, if they keep their promise not to raise taxes or touch Social Security, Republicans will have to find an estimated $700 billion in spending cuts, and there just isn’t enough money in the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts to get that done.
Meanwhile, there is the matter of the domestic economy under Clinton’s stewardship.
The deficit-that “ticking time bomb” that Perot kept talking about two years ago-will fall below $175 billion next year, down roughly 20 percent from last year.
That same deficit was $284 billion before congressional Democrats, without a single Republican vote, passed a deficit-reduction plan that Clinton sent to Capitol Hill last year.
If you’ll remember, that Clinton budget, which required Vice President Al Gore’s vote in the Senate to reach passage, was certain to derail the domestic economy and strangle former President George Bush’s pallid, jobless economic recovery.
A “job-killer,” Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) called it, and his argument was echoed by Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), among so many others in Congress.
That was 4 million jobs ago, of course, in an economy that is rolling along at a pace that keeps the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in anticipation of inflation.
Should Clinton get credit for a percolating economy? High priests of the dismal science argue that one long into the night, but you know the president would be catching the blame if we were still mired in a recession.
When the Republicans ask you to sign their “contract,” it would be useful to remember what their party did to the economy in the Reagan-Bush years. They assume you’ve forgotten.
They assume you’ve forgotten that when they controlled the White House (and the Senate for six years in the 1980s), they insisted we would “grow” our way out of the deficit they eventually quadrupled.
In a recent article in The Washington Monthly, former Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley writes, ” … (In 1981-83) I wrote a lot of gargle about how we could absorb these, uh, revenue shortfalls-or whatever camouflage grease I was applying to the d-word in those days-but my fingers always felt a little dirty after lifting off the typewriter.”
Buckley-no fan of the Clinton administration-makes the point that while Reagan conservatives attacked government spending, the attacks were entirely rhetorical.
As Election Day nears, here they go again.