WASHINGTON -- Honesty may be the best policy in running a neighborhood grocery store, but it seldom pays off in the political hurly-burly of federal budget writing. It's a lesson that President Clinton is likely to learn quickly in his presentation of a fiscal 1996 budget that in spite of an array of essentially small cuts projects an annual deficit increase of $4.2 billion over this year's figure of $192.5 billion.
The increase -- a very minor one compared with the lollapaloozas of the Ronald Reagan years, when the deficit rose $138.5 billion from fiscal 1980 to fiscal 1985 -- nevertheless sends the deficit up after three straight Clinton years of reducing it. From $290.4 billion in fiscal 1992, Clinton cut it to the $192.5 billion figure as part of the deficit-reduction package he pushed through Congress in 1993 (without a single Republican vote).
For a "mere" $4.2 billion, the president now will be unable to brag that he cut the annual deficit in each of the four years of his term -- a boast that would not have been a bad thing to have not only in the approaching budget battles with the Republican-controlled Congress this year but a useful fact to throw into his 1996 bid for re-election that he says he will undertake.
It will be said by the green-eyeshade types that in writing a budget, they cannot or should not let such crass political considerations enter or govern their calculations. But Democrat Lyndon Johnson, for one, knew better. In driving his budgeteers to produce a politically palatable figure for fiscal 1966, he ordered them to come in with a total budget that was under what he considered the magic number at the time: $100 billion. And they did: $99.7 billion. Never mind that the estimate turned out to be way off, in both revenues and expenditures, and that he ZTC wound up spending $134.5 billion in that year, with a deficit of $3.7 billion.
When Republican Richard Nixon took over the White House from Johnson in 1969, he actually was able to balance the budget and even produce a surplus of $3.2 billion -- the last time a federal budget was in balance. But it slipped into deficit again the next year and the annual deficit has been climbing ever since, with only temporary, slight one-year dips along the way, until Clinton was able to string together three straight years of drops.
In simpler times, when the total federal spending was less than Clinton projects the deficit alone will be next year ($195.6 billion in fiscal 1970, also under Nixon), the applicable axiom was for a president to send to Congress an annual spending plan that had sufficient fat built in for the most essential or desired programs to survive expected congressional cuts.
More recently, with budgets going through the roof, presidents have taken to claiming annual sources of income that were totally unrealistic, if not impossible, and to disguising tax increases under such pseudonyms in the Reagan years as "revenue enhancements," all to make their deficits seem less than they would prove to be.
When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, however, he vowed all that would change, and that he would submit honest budgets based on honest accounting and premises. Although the Republicans say he is inflating prospective savings, the best indication that he has lived up to his word is the latest budget that admits to a paltry deficit increase of $4.2 billion. LBJ would have swept that much under the carpet without blinking an eye, and Reagan would have found enough mythical "revenue enhancements" to claim no deficit increase had he gotten that close.
Maybe the country should be grateful that it has a president who won't stoop to such gimmickry to preserve his record of having reduced the deficit each year he has been in office. The question remains, however, why in a new federal budget of $1.61 trillion, his number-crunchers couldn't find $4.2 billion more in legitimate cuts to preserve his political bragging rights. Who would have screamed, for example, if his modest $63 billion middle-class tax cut had been trimmed to $58.8 billion? As the immortal Prof. Casey Stengel once said of his struggling, inept New York Mets: Can't anybody here play this game?