Hours before President Clinton got the 51-50 squeaker-vote victory assuring passage of his $1.5 trillion budget bill, his aides and GOP leaders were quietly debating the issue of, yes, higher taxes.
The question is: Now that Clinton has spent so much political capital on $241 billion worth of new taxes over five years, how does he get the money for health insurance for all Americans whether they have jobs or not, for worker retraining required under a new trade pact and "ending welfare as we know it," for 100,000 more police officers on the streets and for all the other promises he's made?Republicans such as Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia insist Clinton can't ask for higher taxes again because he's gotten all he'll get.
Extension of that argument implies that since Clinton was going to lose popularity anyway by dropping his promise of a middle-class tax cut and increasing the gas tax, he might as well have proposed more taxes on the middle class.
The White House rebuttal is that Clinton doesn't intend to ask for "broad-based" new taxes, such as middle-class income tax increases.
But he will seek cigarette and alcohol tax hikes at the least and may insist employees pay more for health insurance, even though coverage is likely to change as Clinton asks Americans to buy coverage through mammoth new purchasing cooperatives that would represent big and small employers.
When Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke to the American Hospital Association in Florida earlier this month, she was careful to suggest that there will be tradeoffs to cooperation on health-care reform. Antitrust laws have prevented some hospitals from merging or sharing high-tech equipment, and Hillary Clinton promised that would be dealt with when the president unveils his plan, possibly on Sept. 22.
But most Americans are braced for the bottom line and do not believe savings from reform will be enough to include, for example, the 37 million Americans who don't have coverage.
The hope of the administration is that the economy is recovering in earnest now and that, bolstered by the belief Clinton is serious about reducing the deficit, the financial markets will help this recovery.
But by the end of Clinton's first term, the national debt will be close to $5 trillion - if all goes well - and not one penny of it will have been paid off.
The problem of debt reduction is never talked about as the nation labors under the delusion that deficit reduction is enough.
Nobody honestly expects a vote in Congress on a realistic, honest, progressive health-care reform package before next year. If Clinton can deliver it without new taxes or partisan bickering, it will be wonderful. It will also be a miracle.