Molly Ivins July 27

AUSTIN — Now we're in mid-battle over a tax cut, and all we can do is keep track of who are losing their heads.

Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, normally an estimable fellow, got carried away by the excitement of it all and announced in response to a radio address by President Clinton: "The Democrats, they look at surplus dollars, and they always look for ways to spend them on new programs; while Republicans see surplus dollars and they look at ways to cut your taxes." That's a hard proposition to defend with facts.

For one thing, this isn't a fight about whether to have a tax cut; it's a fight about whose taxes should be cut and by how much. Clinton favors a cut in the neighborhood of $250 billion to $300 billion, while the House Appropriations Committee (chaired by Rep. Bill Archer of Houston) proposes an $864 billion whopper that explodes to a $3 trillion cut in the 10-year period starting in 2010.

Further, Clinton wants to cut taxes for the working and middle classes so as to encourage retirement savings. Archer wants to cut taxes for the rich — eliminate the estate tax, cut capital gains, a 10 percent across-the-board income tax cut and a whole nasty nest of tax loopholes for special interests snuck in by lobbyists.

Clinton wants to shore up Social Security and Medicare — not new programs. The R's, in a telling move, want to pass tax cuts before they even pass this year's spending bills. Since this is the party that passed the monster highway bill from hell that broke every spending limit in the budget agreement, that's an alarming sign.

Gee, I can remember when Republicans were considered the party of fiscal restraint and sanity. Of course, that was before Ronald Reagan introduced us all to supply economics, where they cut taxes, increased military spending by $2 trillion and waited for the deficit to go away. Fixing that mess cost George Bush the presidency and the Democrats control of Congress.

One hates to interrupt all this political posturing with a sensible suggestion, but it actually would be a good idea to pass the spending bills before deciding the size of the tax cut. But in one of the oddities of governance that are a consequence of the Republicans' slim majority in the House, a small group of right-wing congressmen led by Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is effectively delaying all spending bills until its demands are met.

In other considerations fiscal, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Senate's No. 1 recipient of contributions from the oil and gas industry, wants to extend her nasty little midnight rider for two years. This, you may recall, is the rider she has put on the Interior spending bill in the past that would prevent the department from charging the oil companies market prices for drilling on public land.

Believe it or not, the oil companies pay the government and Indian tribes based on artificial prices that the companies dream up themselves. I know that's crazy; you know that's crazy. In the real world, when oil companies drill on private land, they pay the owners according to the price of oil.

This rip-off will cost the government another $130 million over the life of the rider. The states no longer let the oil companies get away with this fraud. Texas, along with other states, has successfully sued the companies for underpaying royalties and recovered about $5 billion.

More fiscal follies: We now learn that the Pentagon has defied the law and misused at least hundreds of millions of dollars on weapons systems that Congress has explicitly killed. It is hard enough to get Congress to kill off a ruinously stupid weapons system — it happens once in a blue moon — without the Pentagon ignoring Capitol Hill. The Comanche helicopter is but the latest example in a long line of such idiocy — after 16 years and $4 billion, it is the most expensive helicopter in history and it still can't fly. Now, the Air Force is in a new round of its permanent folly called "We need a new fighter plane."

Meanwhile, anyone without a dog in those fights can look at the military and tell what it needs is more flexibility, mobility and pay raises. But there is no lobby for flexibility, mobility does not make campaign contributions, and military personnel who need pay raises don't have a PAC. The defense industry, however, continues to cost us stupefying amounts of money and adversely affect the efficiency of the military because we let this miserable system of legalized bribery of our politicians continue.

Meantime, we can see the effects of previous budget stupidity in another area. Going back to James Watt and on through the Republican revolution, the Interior Department in general and park spending in particular have been considered worthy targets for cutting. As a consequence, the parks are in real trouble. Our parks get more visitors every year, but we don't spend enough to maintain them properly, so they are being degraded in dozens of ways.

We can always buy a new plane. We can't buy a new Yellowstone.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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