Good Advice

A dozen more or less distinguished Americans, each with a record of public service, have sounded a timely warning about the risks to national security of doing business as usual in Washington. Their admonition is addressed to the next President and to Congress, but the electorate also has much to gain from their proposals.

“Continuing to live beyond our means is a sure recipe for disaster both for the national economy and for the national security,” the consensus document concludes.

“Adequate resources exist to provide both neessary social services and an adequate defense, but it serves no constructive purpose to pretend that sacrifices are unnecessary to secure them or that the American people can get deficit reduction, adequate defense, increased social spending and tax reduction all at the same time,” they affirm.

Democrats and Republicans, former Cabinet officers, two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office, a former national-security adviser, a distinguished banker and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board make up the group issuing the policy statement through the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute in Washington. They are Michael Blumenthal, Harold Brown, Melvin Laird, Rudolph Penner, Peter Peterson, Alice Rivlin, Felix Rohatyn, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, William Simon, Cyrus Vance and Paul Volcker.

There are two things that separate this from other reformist appeals and give it strength: It talks candidly about the need for new resources, and it speaks specifically about things that should be done to implement budget cuts.

On taxes, for example, it wisely points out that the voters must be persuaded that they are getting good value before the new taxes will be supported. The gap between what the American people want in government services and the taxes that they are willing to pay “is not surprising in view of the fact that they have been told by their leaders that revenue increases are not needed even as popular social services also are maintained.” Both the Kemp-Roth tax cuts of 1981 and the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction formula of 1985 “pitted defense and international affairs against domestic social expenditures in a way that was not healthy for any of these programs or for the nation,” they concluded. The report identifies two taxes that would not impede economic expansion: energy taxes and progressive consumption taxes. Good advice.

In reviewing the defense budget, the 12 authors also are specific, concluding that financing will level off, that the shifting of portions of all of the military services to reserve status will be necessary, and that it will be necessary to eliminate some programs, like the Strategic Defense Initiative, that seem to fall into a category of proposals that “are no longer realistic.” There is also a strong plea for increased foreign-aid funding--a welcome innovation at a time of declining American support for these programs, which, as this report emphasizes, are important to national security.

There is, in our judgment, only one stark departure from what is constructive in the paper. In talking about sacrifices and the need for budget reductions, the report includes Social Security, noting that it represents 20% of total spending and 30% of non-defense spending. That ignores the special status of Social Security, which is a separate and self-funded federal program generating, at this time, its own massive surplus in anticipation of increased expenses in the next century with the graying of America. There seems to be no more effective means to undermine confidence in the budgeting of the federal government than to confuse an independent program like Social Security with the other social programs in the federal budget.

The report deserves attention, not least from George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis. It merits attention above all as an important response to a problem that the report itself identifies at the outset: “To continue to play a constructive role as the leader of the free world, the United States must get its financial house in order now.” In effect, the report’s authors are saying that neither Ronald Reagan nor Congress has done that.