In the Economics You Can Understand tradition, President Bush`s newest deficit-reduction idea is a worthy successor to George McGovern`s $1,000-per- American gift and Jerry Brown`s flat tax. Under Bush`s proposal, citizens could check off up to 10 percent of their income taxes to help backfill the national debt. Politically, the scheme may be DOA, but that doesn`t mean it shouldn`t be talked up.
Admittedly, anything as simple as the 10-percent check-off morally offends Congress, whose many lawyer members worship stipulation, fine print and escape clauses. . . . Congress likes only deficit-reduction bills that allow for copious tinkering. That`s why federal spending has grown seven times faster under the loopholed 1990 Budget Enforcement Act than under the lamented Gramm-Rudman controls.
Another hard political fact is that George Bush is a weak-voiced herald of budgetary reforms, having scrupulously avoided close combat over any such reforms while president. When he announced the 10-percent plan in Houston, Bush made it sound gimmicky. But Bush could make the dialogues of Plato sound gimmicky. Already on the GOP`s young campaign trail, the check-off initiative plays second fiddle to catty insinuations of Democratic paganism.
Even so, the 10-percent solution is a fight worth making. Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation perhaps optimistically figures that the federal budget would run a $26 billion surplus by 1997 if all taxpayers earmarked the max. Also, as revenues grew scarcer, lawmakers would be pressured to trim many ”sacrosanct” entitlement programs. Full federal coffers would generate tax cuts. If all that didn`t get the U.S. economy off its sickbed, call a priest.
Even if the 10-percent option went nowhere, its vigorous advocacy would define the Republican difference while making Bush the leader of a citizen army seeking empowerment to control the nation`s pernicious debt. Talk about direct democracy. The potential is here to out-Perot Perot.
