Perot Mum on Discrepancy in Budget Figures : Economy: The Texas billionaire has little to say about his self-touted blueprint. Experts claim it falls $425 billion short of closing the gap.

WASHINGTON —  In his furious assaults on President Clinton’s budget plan, Ross Perot is making little mention of a plan he proposed four months ago as the solution to the federal deficit problem.

This may be understandable: The 23-page blueprint Perot published in his book “Not for Sale at Any Price” falls $425 billion short of balancing the budget, given current economic projections, and leaves unexplained how he would squeeze $141 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years. Yet the plan presents a problem for the White House.

At a time when congressional compromises have shaved more and more in deficit reductions from the Administration’s plan, Perot’s proposal at least took a daring whack at the budget shortfall. To some folks who are serious about deficit cutting, that boldness has given it some appeal.

“Perot’s numbers are out of date. . . . The plan has problems,” said Martha Phillips, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which advocates fighting the deficit. “But it had some good ideas, too.”

Indeed, the Perot plan also started out as a more daring version of the kind of tax hikes and spending cuts that Clinton himself talked about during the campaign.

The White House view of the Perot plan was apparent Monday as officials responded gleefully to Perot’s roughing-up by reporters Sunday, who questioned him about his proposal on the NBC program, “Meet the Press.”

Clinton said Monday that he was glad someone else had come in for sharp questioning and advised his former rival to stop “wallowing around” in budget matters.

He accused Perot of “running from” the phased-in 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax that the Texan had proposed during the campaign.

Perot’s plan was developed last summer by John P. White, a former Kodak executive who was then a top Perot aide. The $754-billion plan then appeared to erase the deficit. Now, however, it falls $425 billion short of the goal because it has not been revised to keep up with spiraling deficit estimates.

White, now at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, contradicted Perot’s assertion that he could provide critics with more details on his plan if he were just given sufficient time.

“Perot’s just lying--he doesn’t have anything else,” White said. But White acknowledged that “at the big-picture level, the two (budget plans) have similarities.”

Both call for sharply increased spending to help rebuild the economy--what Clinton calls “investment.”

The Perot plan called for spending an added $109 billion over five years on research and development, aid to cities, education and public works. In its initial phase, Clinton’s plan called for spending about $113 billion on such purposes, though the final budget plan apparently will contain only about half that.

Perot’s plan called for cutting another $40 billion from defense spending over the next five years, a figure that is roughly the same as Clinton’s, analysts noted.

Perot’s plan, like Clinton’s, tried to shift more of the federal tax burden to richer Americans. But it did so in a different manner and does not go nearly as far.

Perot’s plan called for increasing the top marginal income tax rate from 31% to 33%; it would also reduce the deduction for home mortgages for homes worth $250,000 or less. Those measures would raise about $49 billion, according to Perot’s figures.

By comparison, Clinton’s plan would generate $115 billion by raising top income tax rates to 36%, and imposing a surtax on income over $250,000.

Both Clinton and Perot contemplated cigarette tax hikes. Perot wanted to double the tax to 48 cents a pack to raise $18.6 billion for deficit reduction. The Clinton Administration is talking about additional cigarette taxes to help pay for universal health care.

The two plans part ways on energy taxes. Clinton wanted a broad-based energy tax that would have generated $72 billion. He will apparently end up with a 4.3-cent gasoline tax that will produce $22 billion. Perot wanted to phase in the 50-cent tax that he projected would raise $157.8 billion.

And Perot’s plan proposed the politically risky move of cutting $141 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. The idea was to permit the big entitlement programs to grow because of demographic changes and inflation but to cut other increased costs by half.

That notion has come in for sharp attack from the Administration and other critics who maintain that specific plans for the cuts should be included in the plan.

In all, Perot wanted net tax increases of $280 billion, and $474 billion in spending cuts. But since the Perot plan failed to specify how it would trim health care and other costs, the White House contends that the plan’s roughly $250 billion in cuts actually is larger.

“I have more verifiable spending cuts than he proposed in his plan,” Clinton insisted Monday.