Dead on arrival is the usual fate of federal budgets sent to a hostile Congress, and President Clinton's third budget will be no exception. Indeed, first assessments suggest he considered his blueprint for fiscal 1996 merely a holding document until the Republican-controlled Congress works its will.
Both parties have tainted their claims to fiscal frugality by offering massive middle class tax cuts that make no sense for an ebullient economy. Such payoffs in advance of next year's elections make it that much harder to hold down yearly deficits. They make a mockery of GOP targets for a balanced budget by 2002; they confirm bleak figures in the Clinton budget projecting $200 billion deficits well past the second term he hopes to win.
Most disappointing in the new $1.6 trillion budget is the president's failure to attack middle class entitlement programs that are running out of control. No ceilings impede their ascent. No interest groups except old-fashioned fuddy-duddies and militant baby busters take note of how this generation is impoverishing its grandchildren.
Mr. Clinton came to office raising high hopes he would get the deficit under control. His first budget contained a landmark $500 billion reduction in the growth of the national debt over a five-year period. His second budget focused on his ill-fated health care reform, which was to be a magical device for containing the skyrocketing costs of Medicare and Medicaid. This time there is virtually nothing proposed to rein in budget-breaking entitlements. The president is effectively passing the buck to Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose economic team has vowed entitlement cuts if GOP backbenchers can be kept in line.
Washington folklore has it that American voters are both dumb and greedy. They are too dumb to see how popular benefits programs are bankrupting the Treasury and piling up debt that adds monumentally to interest costs -- now the fastest rising element in the budget. They are too greedy to permit Social Security and Medicare benefits to be limited for the politically powerful affluent elderly.
Mr. Clinton has effectively accepted this canard. Republican leaders in the House have not -- so far. Though this remains unacknowledged, they are counting on the electorate to realize how feckless and dangerous economic policy has been since the outset of the Reagan era. It probably is fanciful to anticipate that the Republicans won't falter as Mr. Clinton has. But until the GOP presents its alternative budget in the next month or two, there is still time to hope that a dollop of reality will enter the budget process.