TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT1766> <title> May 24, 1993: Budget Battle: Clinton vs. Kasich </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 May 24, 1993 Kids, Sex & Values </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ESSAY, Page 88 Budget Battle: Clinton vs. Kasich </hdr> <body> Michael Kinsley John Kasich is a personable youngish Republican Congressman from Ohio and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. He's been getting favorable attention lately for an alternative he has produced to President Clinton's budget plan. Pundits note with respect that Kasich's plan is 80 pages long, which is the main fact they seem to have absorbed about it. That, plus Kasich's claim to reduce the deficit by as much as Clinton proposes over five years, only with no tax increase, with half the cuts in defense that Clinton is proposing, and (Look Ma, no hands!) without touching the sacrosanct Social Security. For 12 years Republicans have been repeating their mantra--"The problem isn't that taxes are too low; the problem is that spending is too high"--without actually proposing enough real spending cuts to bring the deficit under control. President Reagan never did. President Bush never did. Is Kasich the man to make an honest woman at last of the G.O.P.? Skeptics have claimed for years that you can't cure the deficit without demanding significant sacrifice from the great middle class. Has Kasich discovered a budgetary philosophers' stone? Problem No. 1 with the Kasich plan is that the Republican leaders don't really endorse it. They use it to beat Clinton over the head. However, "Endorse it? No," says Kasich's press secretary, modestly. "We've never asked them to." How convenient. But as long as they're allowing themselves deniability over the unpleasant details, the Republicans cannot claim to have met Clinton's challenge to put up or shut up about his own deficit-reduction plan. Problem No. 2 is that Kasich's plan at best only equals Clinton's in deficit reduction over five years. So forget all that G.O.P. talk--correct talk--that Clinton's plan doesn't cut the deficit enough. In fact, Kasich's fifth-year projected deficit is $228 billion, compared with Clinton's $198 billion. That means in later years, when deficits are projected to increase again anyway, Kasich's deficits would be larger still. Then there is the old blue-smoke-and-mirrors problem. To be sure, there are magic tricks in Clinton's plan too. For example, the President claims $15 billion-plus to be saved over five years in unspecified work-force and administrative cost reductions. But Kasich claims to save more than $70 billion by cutting "bureaucracy" and "overhead." Exactly how, pray tell? Says the Kasich plan, piously: "It is not the role of Congress to micromanage the administrative functions of Executive Branch agencies." Oh, that explains it. Keep in mind that these huge but unspecified bureaucratic savings are supposedly after programs identified as "wasteful" have been eliminated or cut. Other Kasich "cuts," such as $6.8 billion in sewage-treatment grants, simply transfer costs to state and local governments, which will have to raise taxes or increase their own deficits to cover them. The Kasich plan eliminates all the new spending proposed by Clinton, including items Republicans claim to be for--or at least lack the guts to say they're against, such as more money for vaccinating children. Do Republicans now oppose the increases in infrastructure spending (fixing our crumbling roads and bridges) scheduled by President Bush, which Clinton would keep and Kasich would cut? Are they now against increasing the earned-income tax credit--a tax break for the working poor they have long claimed to favor? Do they really wish to go on record opposing expansion of Head Start (which reaches only a third of the youngsters who qualify for it)? Kasich brags about raising Medicare premiums for folks with incomes over $100,000. Hot stuff--about $7 billion. Not so prominently advertised is almost $19 billion in increased costs to Medicare patients of all income levels for lab tests and the use of nursing homes. To put that number in perspective, Clinton proposes to raise $21 billion by reducing the Social Security exclusion from the income tax--only for incomes over $32,000 a couple--and the Republicans tar that as an unbearable burden on the elderly. And how about this half-a-billion dollar cut I see in prison construction? Doesn't bother me. But doesn't it bother them? Is there, in the contrast between these two budgets, even the germ of a legitimate debate about the proper role of government in our society? Well, yes. Kasich grasps a few nettles Clinton avoids for fear of offending Democratic interest groups. For example, he gets $6.2 billion from limiting the Davis-Bacon Act, which is beloved by unions because it inflates wages on federal construction contracts. On the other hand, he is no more courageous than Clinton in taking on America's ludicrous farm subsidies. Could that be because farmers tend to vote Republican? Clinton cuts foreign aid $4.7 billion. Kasich cuts it $13.6 billion. Clinton freezes subsidies to the arts. Kasich slices them in half. He also kills all mass-transit operating subsidies and other subsidies to railroads and airports. By eliminating all Clinton's tax increases, he gives the typical median-income household an annual break of $173 and the typical $200,000-plus household a break of $23,750. The real lesson of Kasich's budget plan is that you can indeed cut spending more than President Clinton has proposed--but not without taking more political heat than the Republicans have shown an interest in taking. By all means, let's have a serious debate about the role of government. Bob Dole can kick it off by endorsing the Kasich plan in all its glorious detail. I really hope he does. In fact, I dare him. </body> </article> </text>