WASHINGTON -- President Clinton formally submitted a $1.61 trillion budget to Congress yesterday that essentially tosses the tough fiscal choices ahead into the laps of the new Republican Congress.
"Like all budgets, it is the start of a dialogue with Congress and the American people," said administration budget chief Alice M. Rivlin of a spending plan that calls for a $196.7 billion deficit. "It will definitely not be 'dead on arrival.' "
Republican leaders in the House solemnly agreed that it was not "dead on arrival," promising to give the budget "an honest, fair look."
But the Republicans also made it clear that they consider Mr. Clinton's spending cuts just a starting point.
GOP leaders criticized the president for sending a budget to Capitol Hill with a projected deficit even larger than the current year's. By doing so, they said, Mr. Clinton was ignoring the mandate issued in November's election -- and leaving it to them to fashion the budget themselves.
"He walked away from deficit reduction," said Sen. Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who chairs the Senate Budget Committee. "While the current Congress seeks to declare war on the deficit . . . the commander in chief has chosen to abstain from the battle."
Added House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich, an Ohio Republican: "If you are president of the United States, you better show some leadership, and this budget is an abdication of that leadership. It is a political document meant to try to trap people who are serious about trying to reduce the deficit."
Mr. Clinton's economic advisers heatedly took issue with such characterizations, but the president himself acknowledged to reporters that he had priorities in mind other than cutting the annual deficits.
"We're creating a leaner, not a meaner, government," Mr. Clinton said. "We're not cutting government blindly. . . . We still have to keep investing to raise the living standards of our people.
"Despite all the progress we have made, there are still too many Americans who are working harder for less."
Mr. Clinton's budget proposes raising living standards in a variety of ways. The first method is with his "middle-class bill of rights." This proposal offers a tax credit for those with children under 13, makes college tuition tax-deductible up to $5,000 -- it goes up to $10,000 in 1999 -- and expands the use of Individual Retirement Accounts.
He would also attack problems by directing greater government "investment," meaning increased spending, in job retraining and adult education; various education programs for poor youngsters, including Head Start; and an expansion of the National Service program.
The president's budget also calls for spending increases for anti-crime measures, environmental protection and immigration control.
Under the president's plan, some $144 billion would be trimmed from the budget over the next five years, most of it from scaling-down the size of the federal work force.
Mr. Clinton proposes using $63 billion of those savings to finance his tax cuts. The rest -- $81 billion -- would underwrite his proposed spending increases and stabilize the annual deficits at about $200 billion through the end of the decade.
This is hardly what the Republicans have in mind; they have promised to balance the budget by the year 2002.
Nor is it what Mr. Clinton promised when he ran for president. In "Putting People First," his campaign manifesto, he pledged to reduce the deficit by the coming fiscal year to $76 billion. Under the budget he sent to Congress yesterday, it would be $196.7 billion, $4.2 billion more than is expected this year.
Thus, critics of the president's budget found it most noteworthy for what it doesn't include: It wouldn't eliminate a single Cabinet department; it offers no cut in the total amount of domestic discretionary spending; it makes no mention of health care reform; it contains no plans for controlling the runaway costs of "entitlement" programs such as Medicare, food stamps, welfare and other poverty programs.
"If we don't tackle entitlements, the next generation is going to find itself with no future," said Mr. Kasich. "The president came eyeball to eyeball with change, and he blinked one more time. Time has come to deal with these entitlements, but the president has refused to do it for basically political reasons."
Clinton administration officials said they were open to Medicare reform, but only if it accompanied more sweeping health care reform, which Mr. Clinton promised in the last session of Congress and which went nowhere.
But Republicans weren't the only ones saying that in settling for a deficit in the $200 billion range, Mr. Clinton appeared to be focusing as much on the 1996 re-election campaign as on fiscal policy.
'Political statement'
"Every president's budget is a political statement," said Stan Collender, a federal budget analyst at the Price Waterhouse accounting firm. "This one is just more political than usual."
Mr. Collender said that the president had concluded that making deficit reduction a priority during the first two years had not helped him -- and that there was little percentage in going out on a limb for cuts now.
Mr. Clinton's economic advisers, at briefings yesterday, repeatedly needled Republicans about the budget cuts they claim to want to make. The Clinton aides said that GOP lawmakers had not provided specifics on the cuts -- and would find themselves taking a lot of heat when they do.
"Are they going to zero out Head Start?" said Laura D'Andrea Tyson, who chairs the president's Council of Economic Advisers. "They will find these are very popular programs."
Economists such as Mr. Collender agreed with that assessment. But what was different about the Clinton administration's attitude yesterday was the indifference that at times bordered on hostility to the notion of balancing the budget.
Asked repeatedly to declare that she considered a balanced federal budget to be desirable, Ms. Tyson refused. At a lunch with reporters, she went further, insisting flatly that there is "no relation" between the deficit and the performance of the economy.
'Under control'
Even Ms. Rivlin, a well-known "deficit hawk" who had been opposed to tax cuts, stuck to this line, asserting that the deficit was "under control."
In a series of briefings, Mr. Clinton's top economic advisers sought to deflect criticism of the newly rising deficit projection by:
* Insisting that if the last projections of the Bush administration were used as a baseline, they have cut the deficits in half.
* Asserting that if instead of using total dollar figures, the deficits are considered as a percentage of gross domestic product, the proposed deficit for the coming year is less than the current one.
* Assailing the Republicans for not yet even having specific plans to cut the deficit.
Nonetheless, if Mr. Clinton's budget were adopted, he would be on a course of adding nearly $1 trillion to the national debt even if he served only one term. Currently, the national debt requires a payment of interest each year -- $257 billion in the coming year -- that is nearly the same as the entire amount the United States spends on national defense.
That is the rationale, Republicans say, not only for deficit reduction but for a balanced budget amendment. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican, noting that Democrats have been saying that the budget can be balanced without an amendment, said that Mr. Clinton isn't even trying.
"The president admits that for the next 12 years there will be deficits of at least $190 billion," he said.
HIGHLIGHTS
Deficit: The $1.61 trillion spending plan projects a deficit of $196.7 billion, an increase of $4.2 billion from 1995. Deficits would remain in the $190 billion range for most of the next five years.
Tax cuts: Tax credit for families with children under 13, available to families with adjusted gross income of up to $60,000.
Education: Tax deduction for college tuition, starting at $5,000 in 1996 for those who meet income guidelines.
Defense: A 2.4 percent military pay raise. Size of the armed forces would continue to decrease.
Program cuts: More than 100 small programs would be abolished and five departments restructured, with a goal of eliminating 36,000 federal jobs.