Master of an Arcane Crisis

By Hugh Sidey

Those people who fiddle around with the federal budget have become the new cult figures in Washington. There is glamour in ledgers, computer print-outs and bar graphs. The big star, clearly, is David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget. But Alice Rivlin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, surely deserves an Oscar for supporting actress in this new drama.

Some of the Senators and Congressmen who have mastered the lingo and the media--tossing off a deficit estimate or a new tax reform at the drop of a camera-- have also become folk heroes of a sort. Republican Pete Domemci of New Mexico is enhancing his image as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. Another star is James R. Jones, the pleasantly determined Democratic Congressman from Oklahoma who chairs the House Budget Committee. In the battle over figures that now commands the front pages and more time than the Join Chancellors probably would like to give it on the nightly news, Jones has been particularly prescient and responsible. He saw the budget crunch coming back in 1972 when he was first elected to Congress. "The Government even then was running away from the people," he says.

Money has always been a basic ingredient of the Washington pudding. But it was far less dominant a factor in the years when the economy was expanding. There seemed to be plenty for everybody. Not so long ago, the budget process was left to eccentric men like Missouri's Clarence Cannon, who ran the House Appropriations Committee for 23 years. The clerks who helped him were anonymous fellows who lived in Capitol warrens.

Lobbyists and a few journalists knew their power, but Cannon and his moles went largely undisturbed while the great legislative whales like Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson talked high policy about testing hydrogen bombs, shooting for the moon or passing voting rights legislation.

Entering Congress, Jones decided to focus on the economic indexes. "We live by those figures," he says. He had seen the stress as a White House aide, when L.B.J. tried to finesse the costs of his Great Society and the Viet Nam War by refusing to push for higher taxes. The resulting huge increase in the national debt helped set off today's inflation. When Jones was named House budget boss he spent several days on Wall Street listening to its leaders. "Not many of them knew much about Government," he says But an overwhelming number measured the Government's willingness to fight inflation with bugetary restraints.

Jones recalls a lunch one day with Speaker Tip O'Neill. After the session ended the doors were opened for the press, and a swarm of reporters, photographers and technicians engulfed the room. O'Neill looked at the miniature mob and sighed: "I'll never understand why people believe this budget business is so important." The Speaker surely knows now.

The budget business has created a fantasy world in which markets and interest rates plunge and rise on forecasts and prophecy. A change of a percentage point or two in assumptions about unemployment, the cost of living or gross national product can mean projected billions in Government income or deficit That, in turn, means more billions of change forecast in the private money markets, which shudder instantly to new speculation from Washington Ail error of one percentage point in unemployment estimates can add up to a $25 lion error in the budget sums.

Jones believes that this new kind of budget crisis, so dry and arcane, is as much a threat to our society as the more familiar crises of terrorism and armed conflict. A budget cannot be designed these days (as Presidents so often wish) for what they want the world to do. Budgets must be based on reality, to generate trust. Says Jones: "Public confidence is the single biggest factor in making the economy work."

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