Molly Ivins September 30

Fans of professional wrestling (now there's a concept) should glue their eyes on Congress for the next three weeks for some world-class professional wrestling, as our boys and girls on the Hill engage in biting, kicking, gouging and body slams in an effort to produce a balanced (ha!) budget.

Republican congressional leaders made three vows concerning this year's budget process: It would be done on time, they would observe the spending limits to which they committed in 1997, and they would not touch the Social Security surplus. So far, they're one for three and working on blowing the last one.

Wait a minute, you say — isn't this the year we have a huge budget surplus — so huge that the R's wanted to give a $790 billion tax break to rich folks and special interests? President Clinton already vetoed that sucker, and just as well, since Congress is already digging its grimy paws into the people's retirement money.

True, on Tuesday the House passed (417 to 2) a nonbinding resolution saying that it wouldn't touch Social Security. Now we're going to see "nonbinding" defined in action. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin said: "This is a Congress that has a rendezvous with obscurity. ... A truly awe-inspiring record of working so very, very hard to accomplish so very, very little."

The basic problem here is lying.

The 1997 so-called Balanced Budget Act was based on this sleight of hand: Starting in two years, Congress would begin to ratchet down discretionary spending (that's everything except Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt) until 2002, at which point we would finally achieve a balanced budget.

"This is like claiming you'll lose 30 pounds by fasting all of next February," said Jonathan Chait, a budget wonk with the New America Foundation writing in The New Republic.

Now it's two years later and we just hit Feb. 1. It was a monumentally dumb idea in the first place; assuming that military spending just keeps pace with inflation, we'd have to cut everything else by 20 percent — education, the FBI, highways, parks, agriculture, etc. If that were to happen, the savings would be applied to the national debt, thus reducing the government's interest costs, in turn leading to larger surpluses, the better to pay down the debt. Nifty, eh?

Trouble is, Congress has already passed the mother of all pork-barrel bills in a highway appropriation bill so bloated that even Democrats, no slouches at the pork barrel, were awed by it.

And naturally, the Republicans are committed to increasing military spending. This has already led to colossal folly.

From an economic point of view, the single smartest investment that government can make is in research — it pays off by the bucketload. But our peerless leaders propose to cut $1.8 billion from federal research monies — 8 percent to 10 percent of the total.

That includes significant cuts in high-tech research, the field that now accounts for one-third of U.S. economic growth. The cuts include research in basic science, math, space, the environment — and much more is also due to be cut.

Now let's see — where could we find around $1.8 billion to cover 14,000 research grants? Why, look! Here's $1.5 billion to build one ship, a miniature aircraft carrier at the Ingalls Shipyard in Mississippi — which is, oddly enough, the home of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

And the beauty part is, the Navy doesn't want the ship. (It wants the money, but not this ship.) Indeed, the Navy put in a piddly request for $295 million, and one of Lott's senior aides (a retired naval officer) sent back the draft request with a handwritten note saying it was "the wrong answer." The answer that "the Navy needs to support is $375 to $500 million."

On the House side, Speaker Dennis Hastert is putting on massive pressure to fund the F-22 fighter jet. This plane is such a dog, so expensive and untested, that even House Republicans voted to cut the money for it this summer. But according to The New York Times, Lockheed Martin, the primary contractor on the F-22, has "fought back with lobbying, arm-twisting and paid announcements on National Public Radio news programs. And they are likely to win." The sum involved? $1.8 billion.

The military budget already accounts for more than half of all discretionary spending. Good thing we're at peace, eh? You notice the trend here: ever more complex and high-priced military hardware pushed by manufacturers who give big campaign contributions to key lawmakers.

Meanwhile, those who have argued for a smaller, more flexible and more mobile military — particularly the kind of rapid deployment unit that could have gotten to Kosovo or East Timor in time to stop the slaughter — are losing out. We're getting more and more variations on the infamous Apache helicopter, which couldn't even take off in Kosovo.

So be sure to keep an eye on this mud-match in Washington. After all, you're paying for it.

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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