Boxing Clinton in: new spending? It's time for tax relief.

• Author: Lynch, Michael W.

The budget has been to our era what civil rights, communism, the depression, industrialization, and slavery were to other times," wrote the late Aaron Wildavsky and Joseph White in the preface to The Deficit and the Public Interest (1989). "Year after year, the key question has been, What will the president and Congress do about the deficit?"

Ours is still the era of the budget. But as a result of high tax rates and a booming economy, the central question faced by Washington's redistributors changed unexpectedly from "How do we reduce the deficit?" to "How shall we spend the surplus?"

This new question has been rumbling through Washington since late summer, with Democrats split between those salivating to spend and those wanting to pay down the debt. Republicans, who were first to see the surplus on the horizon, have been debating whether to reduce taxes or pay down the debt, although there are spenders in the Republican ranks as well.

Prior to Monicagate, things weren't looking very good for limited-government advocates. They had settled their differences, deciding on an agenda of both tax cuts and debt reduction. But in the "balanced budget" Clinton submitted to Congress in February, the administration went on a spending spree, including more than $40 billion in new spending on such warm-and-fuzzies as child care, new teachers, and anti-discrimination efforts.

Conservatives, who have traditionally invoked the deficit to restrain new social spending ("That is indeed a noble goal, Senator Kennedy, but we can't afford the program"), found themselves in an awkward position. Unpracticed in arguing on principle why government shouldn't provide such things as child care even if it can afford to, they met Clinton's proposals with silence, as recommended in a memo from Speaker Gingrich.

Then came the State of the Union and President Clinton's unexpected proposal to use the surplus to "Save Social Security First." In no position to spend the speech talking about children's issues, Clinton was triangulating, arguing against both "unwise spending" and "untargeted tax cuts" in order to position himself to dictate the contours of both. His preoccupation with Social Security is an attempt to head off any meaningful tax cuts by pitting tax cuts for the undeserving against Social Security for the deserving. But this time, the president's triangle provides an opportunity for those who want a smaller, more effective government to box him in and achieve both...