How to end the mess in Washington.

• Author: Keyes, Alan

"Left to its own devices, Congress will balance the budget on the backs of taxpayers while creating more and more entitlements and regulations."

THE NATIONAL DEBT reached three trillion dollars in March, 1990. While it took the entire history of the U.S.--more than two centuries--for the debt to reach that amount, within two years it had swelled to four trillion dollars, soaring to that dizzying height in 1992.

A rocket shimmers as it leaves the ground and then starts to streak into the sky so fast that it is impossible to follow with the naked eye. Well, that is the country's national debt. It is well past the shimmering stage and is streaking out of sight. Americans have every right to be frightened and angry about this. The debt is not an abstraction--it is real. However, our politicians have been dealing with big numbers for so long that they seem to have forgotten. It is nothing for them routinely to round off figures to the nearest million or billion dollars.

I know this from personal experience. I once was assistant secretary for international organizations at the State Department. My office dealt with the US. contribution to the United Nations and, as this amounted to something less than 1,000,000,000 a year, it was regarded as a drop in the bucket. We did not even register on the radar screen of serious government.

Nonetheless, the higher-ups tried to make it easy, so, by the time budget and accounting memos got to us, thousands of dollars and very often tens of thousands of dollars would have disappeared from sight in the rounding-off process.

This is the rule for virtually all Federal agencies and departments. Collectively, they deal every day in hundreds of billions of dollars. So, they are not rounding off just thousands and tens of thousands, but tens of billions of dollars. The people in individual offices making budget decisions never see the missing figures and, in truth, never think about them much.

In this context, it becomes very easy to forget that a "hundred" in the memo one is reading represents 100,000,000. Why, that's not even 1,000,000,000, you might say once you had been in Washington awhile. You get into that habit, one that reveals a great deal about the transformation that takes place when an individual spends a lot of time working in and around the Federal government.

Most voters think, "Ah, if only we could send really good people to Washington, they won't develop those habits. And then, finally, we'll have good government." It is true that sending good people to Washington is essential to good government. I do not for one moment want to minimize the importance of this. Yet, neither good people nor good government are enough. We send good people to Washington all the time, and they hail from every state in the Union. They are competent, successful individuals loaded with integrity, courage...