Another Budget Game: Can You Top This?

THERE IS NOTHING NEW ABOUT THE WHITE HOUSE and Congress using the budget as the focus for a game of Can You Top This? But a Democratic Congress striving to outdo a Democratic President in cutting spending and the federal deficit? Strange as it sounds, that's what is happening as Congress begins to put the first real numbers on federal spending and revenues. The House budget committee voted to cut spending over the next five years by $63 billion more than Bill Clinton had proposed. The Senate budget committee promptly topped that, voting not only for deeper spending cuts but also for bigger tax increases than the White House had requested, adding up to an extra $96 billion in deficit reduction over five years. Under either plan, the deficit is supposed to fall from around $300 billion this year to well under $200 billion in fiscal 1997, which begins at the end of Clinton's first term.

The President warned that cutting deeper still might stunt the economic recovery. Nonetheless, he quickly accepted the additional reductions voted by the budget committees. He did not have much choice. His own preaching, and the earlier exhortations of Paul Tsongas and Ross Perot, has made deficit cutting the rage; legislators report that on their visits back home they find their constituents focusing on the deficit as Topic A. That mood has allowed conservative Democrats to drive the debate. The White House must hold on to their votes if any version of the President's economic plan is to pass over what is expected to be (and on the budget committees has in fact been) solid Republican opposition. The game so far has been somewhat theoretical, though: the budget resolution shaping up in the committees only sets overall -- and nonbinding -- dollar targets for federal spending and revenues. What counts will be the public mood when the appropriations and tax-writing committees decide exactly which spending programs to cut and whose taxes to raise, and how much.