WASHINGTON -- A high-profile presidential commission seeking ways to restrain the growth of benefit programs failed to agree on a specific blueprint yesterday, after eight months of work and an estimated $1.9 million cost to taxpayers.
Instead, the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform voted 24-6 to send President Clinton a letter calling for budget process reforms and continued efforts to inform the public about problems facing popular benefit programs, such as Medicare and Social Security.
Among those problems are projections that the Medicare hospital trust fund will become insolvent around the year 2000.
And Social Security checks to pensioners will exceed the revenue from payroll taxes by 2013, just as the baby-boom generation begins to retire.
The commission's failure comes at a time when Democrats and Republicans are competing to see who can come up with the most attractive middle-class tax cut, a policy several commission members criticized as a potential budget-buster.
"Congress and apparently the president are now proceeding pellmell to consider tax legislation aimed not at the long view [but] for the purpose of garnering whatever votes are necessary to keep their political head above water," said Sen. John C. Danforth of Missouri, the Republican co-chairman of the panel.
Frustrated commission members defended their work, saying it hadn't been a waste because it had advanced the national debate on fiscal responsibility.
The panel, composed of elected officials and a cross-section of private citizens, produced a video game that gives average Americans a glimpse of the difficult choices involved in balancing the budget.
Of its own $2.4 million budget, the commission expects to return $500,000 to the Treasury.
Benefit programs -- also called entitlements -- are seen by deficit hawks and many economists as the biggest long-term threat to the federal budget.
Defenders of the programs say the answer is to raise taxes, not cut benefits. About half of all American families receive some help through federal entitlements.
"Few easy and popular decisions are available to the American people," said the commission's letter to Mr. Clinton. "That is where leadership is so urgently needed . . . tough action is needed sooner rather than later."
The commission also agreed to send the president several sets of policy options on which its members were unable to come to terms.
And it urged that the government weigh the impact on the deficit of all spending and tax decisions over a 30-year time frame, instead of the traditional five-year window.
Senator Danforth and Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. -- the commission's other co-chairman -- released an ambitious package of recommendations.
It included raising the Social Security retirement age, mandatory individual retirement accounts financed by a payroll tax cut, reductions in Medicare funds, and limits on popular middle-class tax breaks for health insurance and mortgage interest.
But it soon became apparent that the plan had only a handful of votes. The commission's charter required a three-fifths majority (20 out of 32 members) to report recommendations to the president.