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The Real Stuff
Can we make it through a column on Washington without mentioning a come-hither ex-intern, an Ahabic independent counsel, the extracurricular exploits of a certain boy-king, or the maneuverings of competing armies of mouthpieces? Can we dispense for the moment with trying to derive with one more cute way of referring to what may have transpired in the Oval Office? (Has anyone suggested "interncourse" yet?) It will be tough. But let's give it a shot.
While Peyton-on-the-Potomac Place turns, there is real business going on -- or being stalled -- in Washington. The Senate Republicans snubbed out the anti- tobacco bill via a parliamentarian maneuver. (The bill had majority support but not enough to force a vote.) Thus, the Senate Repubs did their party colleagues in the House a tremendous favor. House GOPers, preparing for the election in November, now do not have to confront a knotty dilemma: vote against the tobacco legislation and face a wrathful Democratic assault or vote for the bill and alienate big-money corporate backers (who identify with the maligned, mistreated, misunderstood tobacco industry) and put off diehard conservatives who cannot stand government regulation and who are a key ingredient in the GOP recipe for hanging on to the House. The crash of the tobacco bill prompted Democrats to talk about using its defeat as a club against Republicans during the campaign. But initial polls indicate it may be hard for the Democrats to stoke voter anger on this front.
Less public than the clash over tobacco has been the Republican attack on the poor. Sound familiar? When the Newtites took over Congress after the 1994 election, it was as if the hounds were let loose on social spending for the not-well-off. Time magazine aptly depicted Gingrich as Scrooge on one cover. It took the budget battle of 1995-1996 -- when the government shut down and the public blamed the Republicans for the crisis -- to teach congressional Republicans a lesson. They're not stupid. They saw that Clinton -- declared irrelevant by pundits after the 1994 Republican romp -- had roared back by attacking Republicans for going after what Washington wags called "E2M2" -- the environment, education, Medicare and Medicaid. In the end, Clinton agreed to the basic parameters of a Republicanesque balanced budget and accepted cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, granting the GOP a conceptual victory of sizable proportions. Yet Newtie and his blowfish looked as if they had been run over. Clinton triumphed on the political field and his party nearly succeeded in booting the Republicans from the House leadership. But the Clinton foreign-money campaign scandal broke in the closing weeks of the 1996 campaign and the Democratic attempt to regain the House fell short.
So having learned from that near-death experience, the Republicans this year have shied away from 1995's Normandy invasion strategy. When the House Republicans passed a budget resolution in June calling for $101 billion in spending reductions, there was not much noise about what the GOP was targeting. It was, in part, because the sneaky Republicans refused to specify what would be slashed. But there were plenty of clues to be found in budget documents released earlier by Representative John Kasich, the fresh-faced chair of the House Budget Committee who sees a future President in the mirror every time he shaves. Even though he yanked the details from his committee's final report on its budget scheme, he still said that these documents represented the recommendations of his committee.
As sussed out by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Kasich guidelines earmark $30 billion in entitlement spending for eradication in the next five years, and $25 billion of that would come for programs that serve low-income families and individuals. (This is highly disproportionate. Only about a quarter of all federal entitlement spending goes to the poor.) These cuts are likely to include eliminating $2 billion for certain state workfare programs and further restricting food stamps for the poor. Block grants used to fund child care would be reduced. The Kasich scheme also calls for slicing the Earned-Income Tax Credit for the working poor by $2.7 billion. His guidelines assume a $10 billion reduction in Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor. In other words, Kasich has declared war against low-income Americans
The Kasich Budget would also reduce discretionary spending -- other than that devoted to the Pentagon -- by about $45 billion over five years. (Entitlement spending is what the government is forced to pay out under various laws -- say, Social Security or Medicare legislation. Discretionary spending covers government programs that are funded annually at Congress' discretion.) Again, Kasich has not detailed a list of what is to be gored. Since his budget merely sets up broad categories of spending, he can get away with saying that the specifics will be up to the individual committees that decide appropriations. Still, this is a big blast, for Kasich wants to cut $45 billion beyond the existing freeze on discretionary spending, a freeze which was negotiated by the President and Congress last year. The 1997 freeze agreement meant that the non-defense discretionary spending portion of the budget -- we're talking about funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, fuel assistance for the elderly, national parks, disaster relief, occupational safety enforcement, food safety monitoring, health programs, and much more -- would be squeezed 13 percent by the year 2003. (In essence, Congress and Clinton agreed to let inflation eat away at this part of the federal budget.) If Kasich gets his wish, the squeeze will be 19 percent by 2003. That's a big hit -- and one likely to fall more heavily on the poor.
Now why isn't this the stuff of hot-and-heavy pundit-puffing on Hardball, Crossfire, and Meet the Press? Don't worry, I'm not going to get all schoolmarmish on you. Sex in the capital city is as interesting to me as the next media consumer/voyeur. But as we debate the significance of a certain Vanity Fair photo spread -- no names, please -- and titter over selective tape tidbits, let's realize that Washington is more than a set for bad melodrama.
Now back to our wonky review: Fortunately, not all Republicans are yahoos who think that at this moment of economic triumph it's time to sock it to the poor. The Senate budget bill was not as draconian. The Republicans in the higher chamber are not so eager to rip up last year's budget agreement. But the Senate budget did include modest budget cuts to make up for all the money Congress shoved into the transportation (highways-for-all!) bill.
When Congress returns from its July 4 recess, the House and Senate Republicans will try to negotiate a budget between them. But the two sides will start far apart. Senator Pete Domenici, the Republican who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, is adamant about blocking further cuts in discretionary spending, and he is not eager to swipe at entitlement funds. But Domenici frequently takes stands on principles only to abandon them when pressure descends upon him from his Republican leaders. Once the Republicans reach their own agreement, then they will dicker with the President, who in the past has favored a cut-the-difference stance -- as long as he gets a kid-related education or health program of his own. If the GOP negotiators split the difference and then Clinton does the same, maybe the poor will only get a quarter of the screwing Kasich wants to deliver. Wouldn't that be too bad for the presidential wannabe?
Phony Marriage Vows
The reason why Kasich and other House GOPers are pushing for these cuts is that they are looking for money to pay for a massive tax cut. The Senate may thwart their drastic budget cuts, and the House Republicans cannot draw on the the anticipated budget surplus. Clinton slyly outmaneuvered them by calling for the surplus to be held in reserve for Social Security. Having decided not to challenge Clinton on that front, the Republicans have been hoping that the surplus estimates will be greater than expected so they can grab the "surplus-surplus" for a tax cut. But they haven't gotten a break. The Congressional Budget Office reportedly is preparing a new economic forecast that will show that the federal budget surplus will indeed be larger in the coming years, but only slightly so and not enough to underwrite a big tax cut. How has Gingrich and his lieutenants reacted to this development? They have threatened to fire the CBO head and to slash the agency's funding. No doubt, that will enhance the accuracy of its predictions.
To push their tax cut agenda, the House Republicans and a few conservative Senators have been thumping their chests about the so-called "marriage penalty" -- under which some (and only some) married couples pay more taxes than they would if they were singles cohabiting. But, true to form, this tax-cut thrust is designed mostly to benefit the wealthy. According to the estimates of Citizens for Tax Justice, the leading Republican plan for ending the marriage penalty would devote two thirds of the tax cut to couples with incomes in the top 20 percent -- that is, couples with average incomes of $184,000. And It would cost $31 billion a year. So to hand money to the rich, the Republicans have to make life tighter for the poor. Because the rich are faring well these days, while the disparity between the wealthy and the non-wealthy is at record levels, why not promote a tax cut that only benefits families making less than $60,000 or individuals pulling less than $30,000? For Republicans, that does not compute.
In the adding-insult category, Republicans last week concocted a new capital gains tax break, which will assist speculators. And Representative Bill Archer, the Republican chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, decided to keep on the books an accidental loophole that allows families inheriting estates worth more than $17 million to save $200,000 in taxes. This rule resulted from a mistake made when a congressional aide was drafting a piece of last year's gargantuan budget and tax cut bill. Only several hundred families are affected each year by this provision, yet the cost to the federal government will be an estimated $880 million over the next ten years. The Senate and the Treasury Department tried to correct the error this year, but Archer blocked them. Archer, by the way, represents a congressional district in Houston that is one of the richest in the nation. It's no coincidence he's happy to toss $1 billion in sweepstake fashion to the rich. It certainly is reassuring when Republicans act so much to form.
So there. Not a mention of that subject. But permit me to come perilously close by noting that last week I was on MSNBC opposite Tod Lindberg, the editorial page editor of the conservative Washington Times You can guess what we had been booked to discuss. Surely not the federal budget. During a commercial break, Lindberg remarked to me, "Can you imagine what Washington would be like without this story?" Yep, that's easily done: a place of never-ending political intrigue where the interests of the powerful are tended to with great care and the huddled masses are pressed in the search for revenues to fund tax breaks for those with garages full of Range Rovers. It's a different sort of perversity than that which obsesses most Washington chatterers nowadays. It involves no bodily fluids. Just abstractions, big numbers, and technical-sounding terms and processes. Though he sometimes appears to be drowning in his own muck, Kenneth Starr--sorry, guess I blew it--and his fellow Clinton chasers have aided the Republican cause in at least one fashion. They have made it even harder to pay attention to the mundane matters of Washington. And in this town that is where the true mischief occurs.
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