Surplus mania

All due respect to those who believe the sport is on the level, but the Big Beltway Battle of the Budget is about as legit as Wrestlemania. Democrats dropkick Republicans for favoring Big Tobacco over children, good health and education. Republicans hammerlock Democrats for spending every dime they can get their steroid-enhanced hands on.

Between rounds, both sides stand in center ring, pounding their chests in self-congratulation for delivering the first balanced budget in 30 years, a budget with a $9.5 billion surplus, no less.

But, like those costumed combatants of cable TV, these arch enemies are in cahoots; they share a nasty little secret. The balanced budget is rigged. There is no surplus. That is, unless the world comes to an end sometime in the next 14 years or a whole lot of Baby Boomers fall off a whole lot of cliffs.

The budget that’s balanced is what those with an aversion to telling it like it is call a “unified” budget — a budget that counts as spendable revenue not just taxes and fees, but also the Social Security trust fund. In short, money that should be socked away for the retirement of today’s workers is being frittered away on sugar subsidies and ethanol research.

If the 1999 budget weren’t raiding the cookie jar, it would be not $9.5 billion in the black. It would be $96 billion in the red. Things are roughly 10 times not as rosy as they seem. In 2003, the year the budget, according to last summer’s agreement, is supposed to be balanced, the real bottom line will be a $63 billion deficit, not the $82 billion sleight-of-hand surplus now projected. In 2012, the year the first wave of Boomers gets the gold watch, the Social Security deficit, the difference between what workers are chipping in and what retirees are collecting, will be about $700 billion, which, coincidentally, is about equal to what’s been looted from the system since the looting started in the early 1980s. And this is counting on the economy to keep humming. If Alan Greenspan wakes up in a bad mood some morning, it’s a whole new ball game.

President Clinton came close to getting it right in his State of the Union, suggesting that the comparatively tiny 1999 surplus be set aside for a year-long national discussion on Social Security. Since the amount to be robbed from Social Security during the next five budget-balancing years is amazingly close to the projected Social Security deficit in 2012, the logical result of that national discussion is painfully evident.

The Republican position is harder to fathom. GOP leadership says the so-called surplus should go to tax cuts, with the tobacco settlement used to shore up Social Security. Then they do their level best to derail the tobacco settlement. If Republicans come out of this looking like the bad guys, it’s the role they’ve chosen to play.

The sadly silly part of this is that both sides could take pride and some credit for the modest and honest accomplishment of reducing by two-thirds a deficit that was nearly $300 billion a few years ago. But why settle for modesty and honesty when you can gouge your opponent in the eye and bellow for the viewing audience? Hulk and Viper couldn’t do it any better.