Opinion Editorial | |
| Monday, February 8, 1999 | |
Clinton's 2000 Budget Is A Phony |
"We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect." So said Harry Hopkins, President Franklin Roosevelt's closest adviser, in 1938 in describing the political philosophy of the Democratic Party. The same words could have been said by Bill Clinton today. His fiscal year 2000 budget is possibly the most political one ever put forward. It is transparently insincere in its proposals and filled with numbers that do not stand up to close scrutiny. It is less a budget than a campaign statement, with all of the shallowness and imprecision that characterize such documents.
For most of our history, presidents did not submit budgets to Congress. Congress made the budget and the president simply spent what he was given to spend. At the end of the year all the outlays were totaled and that was the budget. But in the 1920s Congress required the president to submit a plan for proposed spending that would help guide its deliberations. And for many years Congress adhered fairly closely to the president's priorities.
In the 1980s, however, Congress began to reject presidential budgets out of hand. Almost every year congressional leaders would declare President Reagan's budgets "dead on arrival." I recall years in which they were symbolically dumped into trash cans by Democratic members of Congress, ignored and unread. Yet the certain knowledge that its budgets would be rejected never stopped the Reagan Administration from making a major effort each year to propose programs it genuinely wanted to be enacted, and to provide Congress and the public with a clear rationale and explanation for those initiatives.
Clinton's budget, by contrast, is filled with so many initiatives that one cannot possibly take them seriously as genuine statements of administration priorities. Indeed, his main one -- reserving most of the budget surplus for Social Security -- is so poorly thought through that even budget experts cannot figure out how it is supposed to work.
In addition, one cannot take many of the budget projections at face value. The idea that we can seriously count on a federal budget surplus of $393.1 billion in fiscal year 2009 simply cannot be believed -- we cannot even forecast current year surpluses accurately, let alone those a decade out. Moreover, the revenue figures appear to be low-balled in order to forestall calls for tax cuts. Previous revenue forecasts were underestimates (see figure). And there is no reason whatsoever to believe that revenues will fall as a share of the gross domestic product in future years absent the sort of major tax cut that Mr. Clinton opposes.
Source: Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis, February 8, 1999.
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