Word: kasich
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...John Kasich is a personable youngish Republican Congressman from Ohio and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee. He's been getting favorable attention lately for an alternative he has produced to President Clinton's budget plan. Pundits note with respect that Kasich's plan is 80 pages long, which is the main fact they seem to have absorbed about it. That, plus Kasich's claim to reduce the deficit by as much as Clinton proposes over five years, only with no tax increase, with half the cuts in defense that Clinton is proposing, and (Look Ma, no hands...
...years Republicans have been repeating their mantra -- "The problem isn't that taxes are too low; the problem is that spending is too high" -- without actually proposing enough real spending cuts to bring the deficit under control. President Reagan never did. President Bush never did. Is Kasich the man to make an honest woman at last of the G.O.P.? Skeptics have claimed for years that you can't cure the deficit without demanding significant sacrifice from the great middle class. Has Kasich discovered a budgetary philosophers' stone...
Problem No. 1 with the Kasich plan is that the Republican leaders don't really endorse it. They use it to beat Clinton over the head. However, "Endorse it? No," says Kasich's press secretary, modestly. "We've never asked them to." How convenient. But as long as they're allowing themselves deniability over the unpleasant details, the Republicans cannot claim to have met Clinton's challenge to put up or shut up about his own deficit-reduction plan...
Problem No. 2 is that Kasich's plan at best only equals Clinton's in deficit reduction over five years. So forget all that G.O.P. talk -- correct talk -- that Clinton's plan doesn't cut the deficit enough. In fact, Kasich's fifth-year projected deficit is $228 billion, compared with Clinton's $198 billion. That means in later years, when deficits are projected to increase again anyway, Kasich's deficits would be larger still...
Then there is the old blue-smoke-and-mirrors problem. To be sure, there are magic tricks in Clinton's plan too. For example, the President claims $15 billion-plus to be saved over five years in unspecified work-force and administrative cost reductions. But Kasich claims to save more than $70 billion by cutting "bureaucracy" and "overhead." Exactly how, pray tell? Says the Kasich plan, piously: "It is not the role of Congress to micromanage the administrative functions of Executive Branch agencies." Oh, that explains...