Mirage: Why Neither Democrats Nor Republicans Can Balance the Budget, End the Deficit, and Satisfy the Public
By George Hager and Eric Pianin
Times Books, 337 pages, $25
For those of you who missed the anti-deficit spasms of 1982, 1984, 1985, 1990, 1993 and 1995, the 1997 model year is under way. This year the talk in Washington is of bipartisanship and an amicable early settlement, but never mind. The reality is that at the end of the day two things will be true: One, the budget will not be balanced. Two, the public and politicians will all be exhausted and enraged.
If you are like most Americans, you probably wonder why the politicians don’t stop sniping at each other and get this deficit thing solved. Ross Perot told us he could balance the budget without breaking a sweat. Businesses do it all the time, as do households, so why can’t politicians? The answer has never been more clearly and compellingly revealed than in George Hager and Eric Pianin’s splendid book.
Partisanship is a problem, of course. So is polarization, as moderates in both parties have been squeezed out by reactionary liberals, who never met a program they didn’t like, and by revolutionary conservatives, who never met one they did like (unless it was in their own district). Years of betrayals and double-crosses have created what the authors call a “hopeless cycle of revenge,” a “Hatfield-and-McCoy politics” in which no one remembers who started the fight and no one knows how to end it. But that is not the whole story.
The authors have covered the budget wars from the trenches: Hager at The Congressional Quarterly, Pianin at The Washington Post. They understand baselines and budget authority, and their knack for lucid exposition makes the fine points positively interesting. But the greater merit of their book is that they, unlike Perot, understand that the problem is not mere partisan pettiness. The problem is the people. “Voters want a balanced budget,” the authors write, “but since they benefit from big deficits (which keep taxes lower and spending on popular programs higher), they consistently reject most of the realistic ways to get to balance, resisting spending cuts and saying no to tax increases. That leaves politicians with no popular way to do the job.”
The only thing people hate more than deficits is cutting spending or raising taxes. So the first politician who tries doing either one invites retribution at the polls, and usually receives it. In budgeting, the iron rule is that no good deed goes unpunished. “Those who do the heavy lifting get attacked by those who do not,” say the authors. Their sad tale bears them out. In 1985, courageous Republicans proposed including some small Social Security cuts in an anti-deficit package, because Social Security is where the money is. Democrats crucified them, and the next year were rewarded with control of the Senate. In 1993, Democrats raised taxes (mostly on the wealthiest) in their budget plan. Republicans crucified them, and the next year were rewarded with control of the House. In 1995, Republicans tried to take on the wildly escalating Medicare program. Can you guess? Democrats crucified them, and the next year were rewarded with the presidency.
The only exit from this double-prisoner game is for both parties to exchange hostages in a grand deal. But this was tried three times (at least) since 1985, and always failed. The problem is that even as the centrists in both parties fight toward an agreement, the ideologues in the ranks are planting dynamite underneath it. Newt Gingrich, before he became House speaker, blew up his own president’s budget deal in 1990. It served him right when the anti-government jihadists in his own House refused to let him close a deal with President Clinton in 1995. Gingrich became a captive of the zeal he inspired.
And on it goes. “To get the problem solved, both parties have to find a way to work together,” say Hager and Pianin. “But the likelihood that obstructionism will eventually leverage them back into power means they almost never do.”
Hager and Pianin fill their book with vivid accounts of all these budget shenanigans, some of which read like screenplays. Few will forget the scene as a single agonized Republican senator, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, scuttles his party’s attempt to pass a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, or as Ronald Reagan blithely disowns a budget deal that his own Republican Senate risked everything to put together. Gingrich comes off as a ruthless opportunist with a mission, Clinton as a graceful opportunist without one. And Bob Dole, the Republicans’ longtime Senate leader, emerges as the tragic hero. No one has cared more about or worked harder for deficit reduction. Again and again he climbed out on a limb, only to have someone (usually in his own party) saw it off. He was savaged by conservatives for pushing tax increases across Reagan’s desk, and savaged by liberals for trying to get a handle on soaring payments to the elderly. And then, in the end, he sold his soul and ran for president in 1996 as a supply-side tax-cutter. His gravestone will say that he pandered too little, too late.
Gingrich’s “indulgent, sharklike smile,” Dole’s fierce glare, Clinton’s libido (in breaks from budget negotiations, the president watches “Rough Night in Jericho” on TV and, recounts a witness, “The president kept saying, `God, Jean Simmons looks good, doesn’t she?’ “): All of that is here, and the hard facts too. Like any good war story, “Mirage” is absorbing to read and full of sobering lessons. But this war is a long way from over, because it pits America against itself.
