Budget sleight-of-hand

President Bill Clinton, whose apparent idea of leadership is to find a bandwagon and jump aboard, has joined the latest bandwagon, the movement for a balanced budget. The president’s panicky endorsement of the Republican position on the issue raises doubts about his party loyalty and the consistancy of his principles. More important, it places front and center the question of whether a balanced budget is really necessary.

Economists are by no means united on this subject. A number of widely respected thinkers on fiscal policy, including Robert Eisner, former president of the American Economic Association, and Robert L. Heilbroner, eminent economic analyst and sometime columnist for the New Yorker, disagree with the currently fashionable view in Washington.

Heilbroner and co-author Peter L. Bernstein presented the case for an unbalanced budget persuasively in a 1989 book, “The Debt and the Deficit: False Alarms/Real Possibilities.” In it, they argued that the deficit is not as large as it appears because of the flawed way it is calculated, that barring severe inflation its consequences are not nearly as dire as some observers fear, and that it has legitimate and positive functions in a low-tax environment, among them stimulating the economy and financing public improvements in areas like infrastructure and education.

According to Heilbroner and Bernstein, the vast bulk of the federal debt (87 percent in 1988) is internal, not external; in effect, we owe it to ourselves. Repayment in full will mainly benefit American bankers and bondholders, not the public at large. Better to refinance it, as perpetually indebted corporations have done with their operating deficits for years. Furthermore, the authors maintain, federal borrowing does not “crowd out” private borrowers. Rather, tight commercial credit is a result of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to counter real or imagined inflationary pressures. The current concerns about the deficit, they conclude, threaten to “magnify a mouse into a monster.”

A look at history suggests that Heilbroner and Bernstein are right. The United States budget has been unbalanced for 74 of the past 100 years — three-quarters of the time — including all but 10 years since 1929 and all but two years since 1958. The ratio of national debt to GNP (the best measure of the deficit’s economic impact) was larger in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s than in the 1980s. In 1945, it was twice as high as today. F.D.R. could not have combated the Great Depression by providing emergency public-sector jobs for the unemployed without deficit spending. Nor could he have waged World War II. If an unbalanced budget was the key to economic disaster, this nation would have been in ruins decades ago.

Why, then the sudden clamor for a balanced budget? The deficit grew throughout the 1980s, as a result of massive Reaganite tax cuts and two recessions brought about by the Federal Reserve’s tight money policies. This has led to a genuine belief on the part of some respected public figures — Paul Tsongas, Warren Rudman, and other members of the Concord Coalition, for instance — that the government is on the verge of bankruptcy. Their fears may be misplaced, but their integrity is unquestioned.

Others, however, have a hidden political agenda. The rabid Republican right, in particular, sees the balanced budget as a way to gut government programs they have long disliked, including Social Security and Medicare, but could never before safely attack. If the necessity for an absolutely balanced budget becomes widely accepted and approved, they have the cover they need to vote their true beliefs and dismantle the federal social safety net.

Finally, for numerous politicians in both parties, the balanced-budget solution is an easy out. It relieves officeholders of the need to confront the country’s real economic ills, which are caused not by government spending but but the unrestrained excesses of the deregulated marketplace. These ills are more difficult to address because they threaten corporate autonomy, and corporate money is what fuels American political campaigns.

Achieving a balanced federal budget by the year 2002 (as per Gingrich) or 2005 (as per Clinton) will not prevent the destructive dislocations caused by hostile mergers, rampant automation, callous downsizing, and the movement of business operations to the Third World. A balanced budget will not return the jobs of thousands of unemployed Fleet Bank workers in New England, whose former bosses were rewarded for the cutbacks with bonuses and salary increases. It will not bring back Maine’s Delta Airlines service in the northeastern corridor, which was lost to profit maximization in the guise of competition. These and similar actions are symptomatic of a predator form of capitalism that has evoloved in America over the last 15 years, and they won’t be eliminated by shrinking the federal budget.

At some future point, a political leader or party will act upon the realization that the market is not the answer to our problems, but that the market is the problem. In the meantime, scapegoating the federal government and its budget structure is no answer. Obviously, less debt is better than more debt, and it is sensible to move gradually and carefully toward reducing the size of the deficit. But it is not justifiable to put the American people through an economic wringer to reach absolute balance by a certain date, especially since the necessity is unproven and the pain of the cuts required will not be shared equally, but will fall disproportionately on those who need government services most.

Wayne M. O’Leary, Ph.d., is a research associate in history at the University of Maine.