Clinton Goes Blue Dog
LINDBERG, TOD
Clinton Goes Blue Dog by Tod Lindberg With little fanfare, the White House, in the person of Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, took another step in the direction of the GOP budget last week. He allowed...
...That's $55 billion for cutting taxes with no pain and suffering at all...
...Momentum matters...
...It's too late for that...
...Pick the constituencies correctly and you have a decent shot at splitting the Republicans...
...Well, there's the $35 billion surplus in the Coalition budget...
...Had the White House recognized it sooner, the Coalition budget could have served as a serious political bulwark against the Republicans...
...And the Coalition cuts the popular student loan program exactly zero dollars, in pointed contrast to the GOP's $10 billion...
...It could have been a model for Clinton administration legislative strategy...
...Medicaid also takes a much smaller hit: $85 billion versus $169 billion...
...How to pay for it...
...But all along the administration was still unwilling to say it would play by CBO rules instead of its own...
...What's odd is this: If this is where the administration has been going, why did it take so long to get there...
...Now, by its possible embrace of the Coalition budget, the administration can get the blessing of the CBO...
...What about a tax cut, which the president has said he wants...
...It's an interesting adventure in Budgetville...
...Since the GOP plan calls for a $245 billion tax cut that has to be "paid for" by offsetting spending cuts, that's $245 billion in spending cuts Democrats don't have to make...
...It's a start...
...It's a serious budget-balancing plan-a fact that sheds a little light on all the moaning about how difficult it is to balance the budget...
...Accepting their rules, it would try to beat them at their own game, trading in the end a smaller but still substantial tax cut for more spending on key constituencies...
...The most striking and important feature of the Coalition budget is that it includes no tax cut...
...That meant the Democratic alternative had to balance the budget in seven years, as determined by the "scoring" of the Congressional Budget Office, just like the Republican bill...
...We thus had the curious spectacle of a Democratic substitute that was not supported by Democratic leaders in the House...
...In fact, minority leader Dick Gephardt and whip David Bonior took a pass on the whole thing...
...The package they put together offered $858 billion in deficit reduction in seven years, enough to yield a budget surplus of about $35 billion in its last fiscal year...
...Rather than a bulwark, the Coalition budget is likely to be the latest in a series of administration concessions, concessions that seem never to end...
...They just handed over the Democrats' time on the floor to Orton and the Coalition...
...So the Coalition budget slows the growth in Medicare spending by only $168 billion, instead of the GOP's $270 billion...
...Then came a plan to balance the budget over 10 years-except that it relied on rosy administration assumptions, and the CBO determined that it would actually yield $200 billion deficits in perpetuity...
...The Coalition budget attracted 73 votes, including four Republicans...
...In addition, the reduction in Medicare growth the administration itself has proposed is about $20 billion higher than the Coalition's...
...The Coalition plan funds job-training and other "investment"-style programs at much higher levels...
...26, there actually was a serious budget debate on the floor between full-blown competing alternatives...
...Those rules were fine with the deficit hawks of the Coalition, under the leadership of Budget Committee member Bill Orton of Utah...
...Cuts in discretionary spending total $69 billion instead of the GOP's $143 billion...
...First, the administration proposed a budget that never would balance, nor was meant to...
...Not that "cuts" like this were acceptable to most Democrats-including, preeminently, the House Democratic leadership...
...All year at the White House, the administration has divided its time between denouncing Republicans and conceding ground to them...
...Not that anyone paid much attention, but for a couple of hours before the Republican budget bill passed the House on Oct...
...As is the custom in the House, the majority Republicans let the minority offer a substitute budget bill...
...Then the president said maybe nine years-then maybe eight, then maybe seven...
...He allowed as how a budget package offered by conservative House Democrats- the 20-odd group that has dubbed itself the Blue Dog Coalition-might form the basis for negotiations on a final package with Republicans...
...Look at the features of this plan: You can balance the budget and let Medicare premiums paid by oldsters actually fall from 31 percent of costs to 26 percent...
...Such a bill must always be a true substitute for its majority-sponsored counterpart...
Vol. 1 • November 1995 • No. 9
