Molly Ivins January 9AUSTIN, Texas — What a shame that the Washington budget battles now seem like an endless episode of the Battling Bickersons. Did not. Did so. So's your old man. The pity of it is that the battle lines are finally becoming clear. Up to now, it's been a bit like watching the Creature from the Black Lagoon in a set-to with the Swamp Thing: lots of thrashing around in the muck, lots of noise and stink, either children are going to end up living on grates or our posterity will be saddled with debt into eternity. What a wind machine that city is. There is less here than meets the eye and certainly a lot less than the Republican spinmeisters make out. The federal budget deficit for this year will be about $160 billion, or 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product. That's lower than most other developed countries', including Japan's. And President Clinton, the man who never gets credit, had already cut the deficit nearly in half, from $290 billion to $160 billion, before the Republicans took over Congress. When Clinton took over, the deficit was 5 percent of the GDP and heading up. Some big spender. The freshman Republicans arrived in 1995, so full of their own self-righteousness that they proclaimed the notion of a balanced budget a "Republican revolution." They then proceeded to sell out to the special interests at a clip that the hoary Old Democrats never even dreamed of. Come to "change the culture of Washington," the R's proceeded to do so — by making it even worse. Lobbyists writing legislation that covers their own financial interests, deregulating everything in sight (wouldn't you think the specter of the savings and loan scandal would make at least a dent in their deregulatory zeal?), selling out to Wall Street. Stinkola. With the deficit down to a mere $160 billion, balancing the budget didn't seem like much of a stretch — except that the Republicans were determined to cut taxes, especially taxes on people making more than $200,000 a year. Naturally, if you're going to cut the government's income by $245 billion, you have to cut its spending by a lot more. Poor Clinton submitted budget after budget. First, his budget wouldn't do because it balanced in 10 years, not seven — not that there's anything important about seven or 10 years, agreed the economists.
The Republicans then shut down much of the government — and, in a brilliant stroke of fiscal prudence, continued to pay federal employees for not working — until Clinton did what they wanted. So Clinton dutifully produced a budget that balances in seven years with CBO numbers, and the Republicans promptly denounced it up one side and down the other. "It shows us that Bill Clinton is the big-spending liberal Democrat we always thought he was," said Rep. John Boehner of Ohio. The Republicans have now grudgingly kept their end of the bargain by sending federal employees back to work, at least until Jan. 26. But — now here's a new wrinkle — only some of those employees are allowed to actually work. Head Start, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (which regulates Wall Street) and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department are still not permitted to do what we pay them to do. The Republicans don't like what they do, so under the temporary funding plan, these agencies get no money to carry out their work; they just get paid for not working. The Republicans claim that they want to eliminate "wasteful" government programs, but look at that list again. If I were you, I wouldn't put any money into new stock ventures while the SEC is out of commission, but whatthehey, it's your money. We know Head Start works because we have been able to track the kids who go through it for two generations now. They do better in school, their dropout rate is much lower — it works. The only trouble with Head Start is that it's underfunded and can't reach all the children who qualify for it. The EPA may occasionally be a pain in the rear to manufacturers (the people now running the EPA have some really good ideas about how to make it work better — if they could just get the legislation through Congress), but both our air and our water are significantly cleaner today than they were 20 years ago because of the EPA. You can now catch edible fish in rivers that were once so polluted they caught on fire. Because of EPA pressure, the automobile industry is now marketing a completely non-polluting electric automobile. That's an agency that works. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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