Editorials
commonweal TAXES & TACTICS, CONGRESS & REAGAN IS THERE ANYONE who still believes that the president's political successes are based on little more than his ability to provide reassurances backed...
...do not cut social security...
...The tactic itself is an old debater's trick...
...Leaders in Congress must make certain the public knows that the Reagan tax cut of 1981 contributed $135 billion in lost revenue to this year's deficit...
...Presidential supporters eloquently warn against the dangers and even the immorality of continued reliance on nuclear deterrence...
...taxing the income earned by Americans overseas...
...The Star Wars debate, like the MX debate, like the "window of vulnerability" debate, involves controverted facts: is this or that military measure technically possible or politically likely...
...Although eighty-one percent approve spending cuts over a tax increase, the public clearly parts from the president on the amount allocated for defense...
...But wasn't it only a short while back that the same policy-making circles were hospitable to talk of nuclear war-fighting if not of nuclear war-winning...
...The truly disturbing reality, however, is that apparently they count for nothing with the public as well...
...Spending is zooming for only one reason," Mr...
...oil lobbyists...
...While the figures appear to grow week by week, this means roughly that the president wants a reduction of approximately $50 billion in 1986 (trimmed off a $222 billion deficit expected this year...
...What we observe here is not just a government official relaying some doubtful data, or contradicting past statements, or even trimming the facts to suit an argument...
...He is in the prime position to call for tax reform that also raises revenue...
...d) write a resolution stipulating a given amount of revenue to be generated from taxes...
...They include: cutting back accelerated depreciation and the investment credit (about $60 billion a year...
...Furthermore, despite Mr...
...But they'd as readily tolerate these fantasies as take the steps implied in questioning them...
...Therefore, only real waste and benefits that cater to upper income groups should be eliminated...
...5 April 1985: 195 Congress did this to you...
...eliminating write-offs for second-home mortgages or at least putting a cap on the amount deducted...
...But the president is intransigent in his call for another military hike and seems to have locked horns with the Republican-controlled committee...
...Specifically, Congress could (a) insist on a defense freeze...
...they voted for him anyway...
...It is time that Congress took a lesson from the president's book: draw the lines and wait...
...Reagan says...
...Writers on totalitarianism, from Orwell to Kundera, have warned us of that spiritual bog in which words lose all dependable meaning, logic becomes anti-logic, yesterday's heresy is today's orthodoxy...
...The Reagan triumphs rest upon a simple, but effective strategy: first, state an agreeable goal...
...Likewise, our national defense policy...
...Furthermore, couldn't Congress utilize the president's own methods to pressure him to initiate a tax increase despite his "over my dead body" rhetoric...
...Predictably, and controversially, the committee's other suggested cuts are in domestic programs...
...For starters, the deficit ranked second as the greatest economic problem facing the nation...
...Even trimming the thirteen percent increase which the administration proposed for defense would be minor in light of the fact that defense spending has risen from twenty-three percent of the federal budget in 1981 to twenty-six-and-a-half percent this year...
...Mutual Assured Destruction spells MAD, they point out with as much so-there satisfaction as ever crossed the lips of an anti-nuclear activist...
...The president's lobbying reaped a 55 to 45 victory for the MX in the Senate...
...Rightly, the Senate Budget Committee is pressing for a freeze on defense spending, allowing only for inflation...
...Couldn't Congress write into its resolution a goal which it does not expect to implement...
...But switch to President Reagan...
...23-27), the public is anything but reassured...
...While no one wants to prolong the burden of the deficit, further elimination of social programs is not an effective remedy...
...Truth sinks in the muck of cynicism...
...That caused the deficit, though Congress shares some blame for approving these moves...
...Compared to the secretary, Walter Mondale had sounded like a regular Pollyanna...
...The administration runs a good chance of staring down congressional opponents to aid for the contras...
...He is talking about the Nicaraguan contras, an army of disenchanted peasants, determined anti-Communists, and — in its highest ranks — former leaders of Somoza's brutal and corrupt National Guard...
...The last few weeks should have been decisive proof to the contrary...
...Then, if economic growth fails to significantly pull the nation out of its quagmire of indebtedness by this time next year, as the president and all of us hope, Congress can again pressure the president to initiate a fair tax increase...
...Congress should seek the remedy for the deficit in the causes: increased defense spending and tax cuts...
...In the tax reform debates which disappeared from discourse when Hurricane Budget blew in, we were told that these reforms were not designed to raise revenue in any case...
...Good ideas abound...
...Critics were said to be caught in the grip of fear about unrealistic scenarios...
...Nevertheless, someone has got to talk sense on this issue...
...Congeniality is matched by a shrewd Dr...
...The president's statements on Nicaragua, of course, represent no such change in thinking...
...Neither party finds any advantage in calling for a tax hike now...
...What we are observing is more like a meltdown of truth itself — the world made so malleable that anything goes...
...What can be done...
...c) refuse to cut one iota more...
...there is an election in 1986...
...Such a plan has bipartisan appeal...
...The bottom line, he declared, is the deficit...
...What is new, and breathtaking, is that in the twinkling of an eye, basic premises of deterrence have been discarded, attitudes toward whole categories of weaponry have shifted...
...One week later the contras are "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers...
...But that's not all...
...Nor have they embraced Senator Moynihan's suggestion that the government sell its loan portfolio to private banks and apply the earnings to the deficit, saving some $145 billion over three years...
...Given this set of ultimatums, just how can the budget be cut...
...Reagan's consistent refusal to cut the cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients, nineteen percent singled out Social Security as a cut that would hurt them...
...His terms are: increase defense...
...then firmly state the terms so that your opponents will be obliged to accept them in order to reach the goal...
...How does Mr...
...We doubt whether the public believes the administration about Star Wars or Nicaragua either...
...This is understandable...
...It is not a pleasant sight to watch politicians scurrying around telling the poor and others in need of government services to be brave and patient while they themselves simply cannot let out a peep about the need for more revenue...
...Are we to believe that Congress is unable to approve a simple, truly progressive tax which would also increase revenue...
...The important thing is to learn a little strategy from the president...
...First, Congress must not let the president get by with proclaiming that social spending caused the present deficit...
...The truth is that the folksy Mr...
...They have not proposed a gasoline tax as the Economist ventured to do at a safe distance from U.S...
...He had started out with the usual flurry of statistics intended to show that the Reagan administration was doing more for low-income housing than any government in living memory...
...Exclamation point...
...Deterrence was a precisely managed operation then, and who would dare challenge its morality...
...But Mr...
...Nor have they stipulated in their budget resolution that any given amount of revenue be raised from increased taxes...
...If, for example, the Senate Budget Committee freezes the cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients as they have proposed, or if they suggest a tax hike, the president can rightly say, "I did not go back on my promises...
...Reagan's example as the leading proponent of the balanced budget amendment...
...The arms negotiations are inching forward at Geneva without any budging from the Oval Office on Star Wars...
...If we don't do something about the deficit, disaster looms, disaster for the poor and the homeless even more than for the comfortable and sheltered, disaster, he said, on the order of 1929...
...unemployment ranked first by a six percent margin...
...ANYTHING GOES This time the man on the television screen was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development...
...The domestic budget is still bloated with waste and unnecessary programs...
...According to the president, however, they are "our brothers" (one wishes he would simply speak for himself) and they are "freedom fighters," like Lafayette and Bolivar...
...So much for reassurances...
...One day the deficit is nothing but the bogey man of those gloomy economists who have been wrong so often before...
...Anything goes...
...That is why we elect senators for six-year terms, for example...
...Reagan do it...
...do not raise taxes...
...Reagan's policy of lost revenue plus increased military spending forced the government to overborrow...
...Short, sweet, and masterful, is it not...
...Consider Mr...
...Meanwhile, the president can sleep well, knowing that congressional haggling will not amount to much...
...All of this without actually proposing any tax bill, of course...
...The goal in this case is to reduce the federal deficit...
...Reagan's cheery campaign declarations about the deficit...
...Reagan might as well have compared the Sandinistas to Beelzebub himself and the contras to the legions of St...
...What is more, such an effort at public education need not be as politically suicidal as it first appears...
...It prevents a possible backlash at the polls from constituencies hurt by unjust cuts in government programs and subsidies whether they be farmers, minorities, or the aged...
...Reagan never has to run for election again...
...Strategy...
...This gouges a $21 billion chunk out of the committee's $57 billion package of cuts...
...detail and degree count for nothing...
...We have all got to sacrifice...
...eliminating the tax write-off for interest on consumer credit (about $11 billion this year...
...Thank God, it can't happen here...
...If the deficit really matters, then bringing in more revenues is an essential element in decreasing it...
...This makes interesting politics...
...If so, it should be obvious that any wholesale cuts in social programs by Congress would only appear to support the president's contention...
...Whoever sets the agenda has rebuttals already in hand...
...We are waiting for some reputable economist to explain why private banks would be able to absorb these debts as well as the federal government, given the state of banks these days...
...So the secretary went back to basics...
...The next day (the day after the election) the deficit is once again the iceberg bearing down on the good ship Titanic...
...Nonetheless, despite the haggling going on within the Senate Budget Committee (and between the committee and the president), Mr...
...b) cut social programs only in clear cases of waste...
...And the Sandinista clearing of villages to create "free fire zones" in areas of contra infiltration — a measure that some Americans had found painfully reminiscent of Vietnam — is, says the president, "Stalin's tactic of gulag relocation...
...Reagan seems likely to carry off another "victory": social spending will be starved and the military stuffed...
...Michael...
...Last November's election was a testimony to how popular the notion of a tax hike is, and the Times poll found the public's antipathy as strong as ever...
...Take the problem of the deficit and looming budget cuts...
...The poll found that most Americans are also afraid the budget cuts submitted to Congress will hurt them or the nation as a whole...
...And the White House is making only minor adjustments in its approach to curbing the national deficit by further (non-military) budget cuts...
...Nothing new there...
...considering an extension or increase o{ the telephone, cigarette, liquor, and gasoline taxes...
...Congress would wait for presidential support first...
...Not by reassurances alone...
...Tell the public the unpleasant truth about taxes but put the burden on the administration to act responsibly...
...By this point in the broadCommonweal: 196 cast, however, the two other guests had pretty much reduced these claims to tatters...
...They represent a bifurcated worldview in which the only significant dividing line is between Communist and anti-Communist...
...At least one poll showed that the voters never believed Mr...
...Why not...
...Thirty percent of those polled would cut military spending and fifty percent would freeze it...
...One is reminded of those college marching bands that, on the sound of a whistle, immediately fall out of formation, scramble for an instant in a chaotic blur, and suddenly reconstitute themselves, stepping highly as ever, in an entirely new pattern...
...According to a CBS/New York Times poll (Feb...
...The contras, according to Americas Watch, have been guilty of kidnapping, torture, rape, mutilation, and murder of numerous unarmed civilians...
...It also avoids the charge often made against Republicans of picking on the poor...
...Now to the Star Wars debate...
...He i&trying to write into law a goal which he himself will fail to achieve — a balanced budget...
...Still the president persists in equating defense spending with national security — an equation with more at stake than logic...
...commonweal TAXES & TACTICS, CONGRESS & REAGAN IS THERE ANYONE who still believes that the president's political successes are based on little more than his ability to provide reassurances backed by smiles...
...The Economist says succinctly that the president wants to take credit for cutting taxes and increasing defense while blaming the deficit on Congress...
Vol. 112 • April 1985 • No. 7
