Editorial

...Obviously, the better alternative would be for Congress to take advantage of the nation's current economic prosperity and cut entitlement spending now when it would hurt the least...

...Until the poor and the middle class rediscover their shared interests and common destiny, the budget will be balanced at their expense...

...Now for the bad news...

...Worse, the costs of the tax cuts will increase dramatically after 2002, depriving the government of billions in revenue just as Social Security and Medicare spending for retiring baby-boomers begins to rise exponentially...

...First, balancing the federal budget by 2002 seems to exhaust the country's present capacity for political consensus...

...Clinton has gotten the Democratic leadership to support cuts in Medicare spending ($115 billion, thus extending the system's solvency for a decade), while securing from the Republicans reductions in proposed military expenditures and veterans' benefits...

...An important consequence has been a continuing drop in unemployment and people on the welfare rolls...

...In principle then, the agreement makes a start, albeit meager, at reducing entitlement spending while increasing investment in areas such as education and health care for the poor...

...Military spending is also a good candidate for more trimming...

...A proposal to restore some benefits to legal immigrants cut by last year's welfare bill appears to have been one of the first casualties of the detailed negotiating process...

...It can't be said often enough that a revitalized labor movement, one dedicated to winning a greater share of the pie for workers and exerting leverage at the national level, is the best hope for promoting true equality...

...Most important, it has deepened the commitment of both political parties to fiscal discipline, and that discipline has doubtless contributed to the continuing growth of the American economy...

...Republican acquiescence to the agreement was purchased by Clinton's willingness to accept a broad range of tax-cutting schemes ($85 billion worth), including reductions in capital gains and inheritance taxes, whose benefits will go to wealthier Americans (even the child-care tax credit is largely a sop for the middle class...

...Second, the budget agreement promises to undermine, not strengthen, the long-term fiscal stability of the government and the nation...

...Burned by Clinton's skillful manipulation of the budget crisis in 1995, the Republican Congress is not about to close down the federal government again...

...In addition to these important compromises, the agreement also includes spending increases ($60 to $70 billion) for education, health insurance for poor children, tax credits for families with children, and money to help welfare recipients find jobs...

...However, when the Congressional Budget Office announced that estimated tax revenues over the next five years would increase by $225 billion, both Republicans and Democrats were only too happy to drop the politically painful budget-cutting options and let the expanding economy balance the budget by itself...

...Indeed, given the absence of significant reductions in these entitlement expenditures, some estimates have the federal deficit climbing from 2 percent of the GNP in 2002 to 14 percent in 2020...

...EDITORIALS: Unbalanced At least two things can be said with certainty about the budget agreement reached between President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress last month and now making its way through the various appropriations committees...

...Even more disturbing, despite Clinton's largely symbolic success in increasing social spending, there seems little possibility that Washington will soon either extend a bigger hand to the poor or meaningfully expand federal investment in infrastructure or education...

...In signing on to the budget agreement, the Republican leadership has at least tacitly accepted the current role played by the federal government in American life- a concession that the most fervently ideological Republicans in Congress are still resisting...

...Republican talk about eliminating whole federal departments and dismantling the welfare state has also been muted...

...In the first round of budget negotiations, per-capita limits on Medicaid spending, reductions in cost-of-living adjustments, and other unpopular spending cuts were on the table...

...Some future Congress, it seems, will have to clean up after these short-term and near-sighted budget-balancers...

...Superficially, there is some good news in all of this...

...But, as always, there is little political incentive to impose sacrifice when it is possible to postpone it...

...Given the Republican control of Congress, the president and the Democrats are in a weak bargaining position...

...For those concerned about the booming economy's exacerbation of the gap between rich and poor, much political work needs to be done...

...The current booming economy, with a corresponding windfall in tax revenues, has allowed both Republicans and Democrats to avoid making any hard political choices about long-term entitlement spending...