After 12 weeks of fruitless talks about reducing the federal budget deficit, President Bush is threatening to get tough with Congress. Unless Democrats come up with their own plan to slash $500 billion from the budget over the next five years, the president says he will sequester funds, veto spending bills and force deep, automatic budget cuts.
It would be a refreshing and long overdue action if Bush were to confront the deficit in such dramatic fashion. Alas, such drastic measures will probably never take place, although the deficit problem is serious enough to justify those steps.The draconian measures cited by Bush are mostly an effort to get the Democratic leadership in Congress to come up with their own budget proposals instead of letting the president take all the criticism about taxes. Those proposals will appear in due time, but not soon enough.
Congress may take its August adjournment without reaching any budget agreement, despite warnings by Bush about keeping them in session. But Congress expects to get down to meaningful budget work when it returns in September.
Unfortunately, that will be a business-as-usual late start. A budget agreement should have been in place months ago.
The delay will mean that the 1990-91 budget will not be ready by start of the Oct. 1 fiscal year. In turn, this means a huge final bill that is full of flaws, last-minute changes, and deals for special interests.
And it undoubtedly will be a bill that stops far short of the kind of deficit reduction the nation urgently needs. Most members of Congress are not about to make drastic budget cuts in an election year.
Yet Bush might just become an authentic hero if he were to really crack down on the deficit problem with more than just rhetoric. Certainly, there would be howls of protest, but spending must be slashed for the sake of the nation's children and grandchildren who will be stuck paying the deficit for generations to come.
For a start, Congress and the president might try being truthful about the real size of the budget shortfall.
The deficit for the coming fiscal year is estimated at $169 billion. That doesn't count the $100 billion needed to continue to finance the S&L bail-out. Congress did vote this week to stop hiding behind the Social Security trust fund surplus that it borrows to make the deficit look smaller. That would add another $72 billion to next year's deficit.
All of this means the real budget deficit is more than $330 billion for 1990-91 instead of $169 billion. Congress knows that is the real figure because it raised the national debt limit to $3.4 trillion this week. That makes enough room under the debt ceiling for the government to go $322 billion further in debt next year.
The stunning cost of the S&L fiasco has gotten the public's attention. People are angry and ready for Washington to start getting serious about the budget deficit. This is an opportunity for Bush to take charge and make Congress pay attention.