-Caveat Lector-
http://www.msnbc.com/news/791788.asp
Congress abandons fiscal discipline
Critics assail lawmakers over new budget deficits
By Jonathan Weisman
THE WASHINGTON POST
Aug. 9 — Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) can detail the federal government’s
reversal of fiscal fortune as if she’s reading a script drafted by the
Democratic Party: budget surpluses turning into widening deficits,
plunging consumer confidence, a Social Security lockbox that has been
picked and looted — all since President Bush came to office.
BUT HER own record shows that she helped the red ink flow: She
voted in favor of the president’s $1.35 trillion tax cut, in favor of this
year’s $73.5 billion farm bill, in favor of a $594 billion Democratic
proposal to provide prescription drug coverage to seniors.
Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) has harsh words for big-spending
Democrats and the lapse in budget controls since they took control of the
Senate. But Snowe, who once tried to tie future tax cuts to federal debt
reduction, went along with a tax cut with no such protection, then voted
for the farm bill and a GOP prescription drug bill worth $370 billion over
a decade.
‘TENUOUS TIME’
“I feel a responsibility. Of course I do,” Snowe said. “But it’s a
very tenuous time right now. We can’t take these votes in isolation and
dismiss the context.”
Landrieu and Snowe represent a remarkable trend in both parties,
lawmakers willing both to cut taxes dramatically and to raise federal
spending significantly. The trend goes a long way toward explaining the
growing budget morass the government finds itself in after four years of
surpluses, and it turns political conventional wisdom on its head.
The Democratic orthodoxy once held the line on tax cuts to free up
spending on federal programs that the party saw as vital. The Republican
orthodoxy tried to restrain spending so that taxes could be cut and the
overall size of government would shrink.
Now, those basic principles have all but disappeared. Since
February 2001, tax cuts and added spending have wiped out $2.25 trillion
of projected surpluses over the next decade, says the White House’s Office
of Management and Budget. In contrast, the economic downturn has cost the
Treasury $1.7 trillion.
The bulk of the new spending is for the military and homeland
defense. Both the Senate and the House have overwhelmingly approved the
largest defense spending bills in history, worth $355 billion for fiscal
2003, a $37 billion increase over this year’s level but $12 billion below
Bush’s request.
And a pricey prescription drug plan still looms. If it passes and
the president’s tax cut is extended, Robert Reischauer, a former director
of the Congressional Budget Office, predicts annual deficits of $200
billion “as far as the eye can see.”
“We are on the edge of an abyss, and one step more and we’re going
to commit fiscal suicide,” said Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio).
On three proposals alone, the tax cut, the farm bill and the drug
plan, Landrieu and 11 other Senate Democrats cast votes that would cost
the Treasury nearly $2.7 trillion over the next decade, more than $3
trillion if added interest costs from a rising federal debt are included.
During this session of Congress, 21 House Democrats voted for the tax cut,
the farm bill and their own prescription drug proposal. Total price tag:
$2.89 trillion over 10 years.
A CHANGED CLIMATE
In sheer numbers, Republicans were even less restrained. In the
House, 136 Republicans — more than half the House total, including Budget
Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (Iowa) — voted for the tax cut, the farm
bill and their drug plan. Total 10-year price tag: $2.44 trillion. With
spending rising, tax receipts falling and the government close to
defaulting on some of its loans, two of those Republicans, Reps. Walter B.
Jones Jr. (N.C.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.) bucked their leaders to vote in
June against raising the statutory federal debt limit by $450 billion.
One of the Republicans in this group, Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.,
is running for Maryland governor on a “Back to Basics” budget message.
In the Senate, 18 Republicans, more than a third of the total and
including Minority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.), voted to cut taxes and spend
on prescription drugs and farm subsidies to the tune of $2.46 trillion.
One Republican, Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (Ill.), voted for the tax cut, the
farm bill and the more expensive Democratic drug plan.
White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. said he had
hoped the quickly eroding budget picture would reverse a trend toward
profligacy. But he also said he could understand the difficulties Congress
and the White House are facing in the wake of Sept. 11, a recession and a
dramatic stock market slide.
Lawmakers point to three factors that have changed the climate on
Capitol Hill:
Sept. 11, which triggered new military, homeland defense and
reconstruction spending, plus other spending only superficially related to
terrorism. “Everything changed after September 11th,” said Sen. John
Breaux (La.), one of the 11 Senate Democrats who voted with Landrieu.
The expiration of formal budget constraints enshrined in the
balanced budget deal of 1997, coupled with the failure of the Senate this
year to enact a budget framework. The Democrats “have no budget,” said
Snowe, one of the Senate Republican 18. “There’s no budget resolution for
the first time in history.”
MODEL SET BY THE WHITE HOUSE
In varying degrees of fervor, Democrats and Republicans alike point
to Bush as setting the path for their votes. Bush pushed the tax cut,
signed the farm bill and has expressed support for GOP prescription drug
proposals that cost more than twice the plan he has drafted — even as he
berates Congress for overspending.
Democrats who voted for tax cuts and new spending say they have to
vote in their constituents’ interest. It is the president who has to look
at the big budget picture.
“When I was governor, I balanced the budget all eight years,” said
Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), who sponsored Bush’s tax cut proposal, then
co-wrote the Democrats’ prescription drug bill. “I could balance the
budget here too if I had the power. But I don’t.”
Landrieu echoed that sentiment.
“I’m only one of 535 members of Congress,” she said. “You’re
presented with a bill. Either you vote with your farmers or you vote
against them.”
Republicans say Bush has chastised lawmakers for overspending, but
he has yet to veto a bill. That has hurt his credibility, some say. Rep.
Ray LaHood (Ill.) was one of three Republicans in the class of 1994 who
refused to sign the “Contract With America” because he believed the budget
should be balanced before taxes were cut. But this session, he was among
the GOP majority that voted for the tax cut and the big-ticket spending
bills, in part, he said, because there was nothing to fear from the White
House.
‘HELD HIS NOSE’
Bush “held his nose and signed the farm bill. I think he’ll hold
his nose and sign the prescription drug bill. He’ll probably hold his nose
and sign a lot of other bills, despite talking a good game on spending,”
LaHood said.
Voinovich said he warned senior White House officials that signing
the farm bill “would be the biggest mistake of [the Bush] administration.”
“I said by signing that bill, [Bush] would make it very difficult
for our colleagues to say ‘no’ to anything else,” Voinovich recalled.
Daniels did not deny the point, but he cited showdowns between
members of the appropriations committees and the president over spending
bills that were ultimately pared back.
There is another factor that has shifted the politics — the
lessening of fiscal pressure from voters. Free-spending lawmakers say
budget issues that weighed on voters’ minds in the 1980s and 1990s have
all but disappeared on the campaign trail. “People talk about security,
pension security, national security, job security,” said Sen. Jean
Carnahan (D-Mo.), who is in a tough campaign to complete her late
husband’s term. “Nobody’s coming up to me and saying, ‘I want to talk to
you about the deficit.’ ”
Then there is the curve that terrorism and economics threw at
Congress. The budget deficit concerns of the 1990s gave way to surplus
politics in the latter years of the Clinton administration. Democrats made
the pitch for large new programs, such as education spending and
prescription drug coverage for seniors, that became so popular that they
were adopted by Republicans. Large-scale tax cuts became part of the GOP
platform. Both parties pledged to use surplus Social Security tax receipts
to reduce the debt or fix the program’s long-term problems.
Then, because of the Sept. 11 attacks, a concurrent economic
slowdown and the tax cut, the budget picture reversed on a dime, too
quickly for the parties to change their promises, Reischauer said. The
Social Security surplus was gone before it could become a political issue.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) protests that
the Democratic leadership should not be blamed because of the votes of a
dozen Democrats. “I don’t think you’re defined by your exceptions,” he
said. Besides, he said, Republican orthodoxy was turned on its head during
the Reagan administration, when the president pushed through large tax
cuts and large defense spending increases.
True enough, said Richard Cogan, a budget expert at the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, but only a year after the Reagan tax cut was
enacted, leaders of both parties began grappling with the worsening budget
deficit. A year after the Bush plan passed, experts say, both parties
appear intent on making the situation worse.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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