BE OUR GUEST: THERE ARE WAYS FOR CLINTON TO CUT THE DEFICIT IF HE REALLY MEANS BUSINESS

Bill Zellmer is a freelance writer who resides in Cape Girardeau. He previously worked as city editor in a Sarasota, Fla. newspaper, and owned a bi-weekly newspaper in Arkansas.

Listening to members of the Clinton administration, you have to ask yourself, are they simply naive or are they totally ignorant? Is their current train of thought as empty-headed as their campaign rhetoric, or is one as devious as the other?

Take, for instance, the Clintonites' comments on the devastating federal deficit, which is there because successive Democratic Congresses - with the help of equally blind and unconcerned Republican White Houses - put it into place.

High on Clinton's hit list is Social Security. This is a scam, and one we mustn't let them get away with.

If I understand the federal budget correctly, the Social Security Trust Fund is a separate entity and has nothing to do with the federal deficit. The Trust Fund is flush. It's the general budget that is continually overspent. The only connection between the two is that Congress has routinely plundered one - the Trust Fund - to help fund the other.

According to a conservative Republican senator, Charles Grassley of Iowa, who serves on various budget or appropriations committees, Congress took $70 billion last year from the trust fund to help offset the general budget deficit. Congress has routinely looted the trust fund since it passed a major increase in the FICA withholding tax in 1983.

They lied to us then, telling us they had to increase the withholding on the working man to keep the trust fund solvent. And they are lying to us again. Actually, all 1983's hike was was an income tax increase, cloaked as something else. The extra FICA withholding creates a surplus; the economic morons in Congress - or are we the morons for re-electing them? - use it to help fund the general fund.

The Clintonites are also leaning toward major gasoline tax increases, such as those proposed by good ol' Ross Perot. That also raises serious budgetary questions.

Historically, gasoline taxes have been used to fund the Highway Trust Fund, also separate from the general fund, and also highly solvent. The budgetary wizards maintain a highway fund surplus of about $19 billion, which, on paper at least, is used to also offset the general fund deficit.

But I don't think they have ever actually used the highway funds for general budgetary purposes, or even if the law allows it. Now the question is, do we really want to pay more gas tax so Congress can use it to reduce a deficit they create by wasteful spending?

We need to be raising some objections with our congressmen. Gas taxes have always been limited to building and maintaining roads and bridges, in particular the interstate system; I suspect we ought to keep it that way.

The problem with the general budget deficit, of course, is that no one has the courage to cut spending. Our congressmen prefer to raise taxes. We shouldn't allow any form of tax increase, because spending can be cut.

For starters, cap Medicare and Medicaid spending. (Never heard of Medicaid? It's a federal program designed to provide national health care for the poor. Been in effect for years. Much abused, growing like wildfire. You probably have forgotten about it because Clinton was careful never to mention it during the presidential campaign; Bush ignored it probably because he didn't know it existed. Strange oversight, though, in a race in which national health care was one of the major topics. We may need some controls on health care costs but a national health care program funded by the government? If you think we have a budget deficit now, wait till that goes into effect.)

Newsweek magazine reported last year that pork barrel spending tops $97 billion annually. Cut that for two years, or four years. Of course that would require sacrifices from our congressmen who depend on the government's largess to get re-elected. And from their constituents all across the country.

For example, it might mean giving up for two or four years federal grants - read taxpayer grants - such as the $5 million grant that Southeast Missouri State received last year. That was one that Rep. Bill Emerson boasted about obtaining. Remember those photos just before the election? That's the way the system works; unhappily, it's a system we have created, or allowed them to create.

The money was to be used, as I recall the story, to pay the tuition of education majors so they can teach immigrants English. Let's see if I have this straight: Our omnipresent government reaches out and brings into this greatly underpopulated nation of 250 million people more than 800,000 foreigners a year - at a certain cost to the taxpayer.

Then it funds the education of a number of young people at universities all across the country (SEMO wasn't the only university to get such grants) - at further cost to the taxpayer - so they can learn to teach these millions of new immigrants to speak English. Presumably that means the universities have not been equipped previously to teach education majors how to teach English. At least not to foreigners. (Never mind that many other nations already teach English.)

And then we re-elect congressmen so they can go on perpetuating this sort of taxpayer abuse. I know there must be a grain of logic there someplace....

We hear that Bush cut defense spending, and that Clinton plans further defense cuts. Yet the Navy alone maintains three boot camps, each graduating several hundred young men and women weekly. It pays these raw recruits more than $1,000 monthly, plus room and board and education and medical and dental care, and promises them bonuses of $20,000 if they will re-enlist. (In the early 1960s, we got along on $100 a month, plus room and board, in the Navy, and $2,000 re-enlistment bonuses.)

This in a world in which we no longer have a major enemy. Is there a naval power out there that even remotely poses a threat to our shores? These young seamen have so little to do nowadays that their ships spend the winters sailing around the Caribbean so the sailors can have warm weather liberty.

Granted, we're using the Navy now in the Middle East. But we don't need a 600-ship fleet to fire cruise missiles at Iraq.

I suggest even further defense cuts can be made, though Clinton will have to do it now. If he does it later it will kill him in his re-election campaign, as Bush found out in California. Massive cuts would result in massive tax dollar savings. Of course, some of it would have to be spent to otherwise educate the thousands of young men and women who now join the services to learn a trade, rather than go to college.

But that's merely another challenge for Clinton and his recycled Carter appointees. Hey, they asked for the job. No one said it would be easy.

Then there's foreign aid, which you hear congressmen dismissing as trivial. That may be why financial magazines say there are only a half dozen economically astute members of Congress. Yearly foreign aid actually amounts to between $15 billion and $30 billion. That's our tax dollars being given away to the people of other countries. (It would take courage, of course, to slash Israel's yearly $4 billion handout.)

Once foreign aid had a purpose, however foolish; we tried to buy the hearts and souls of foreigners to keep them from going with the communists. With the demise of the Cold War, you would have thought our fearless leaders would have been rushing to cut aid and save tax dollars.

Instead last year they were too lazy to even debate the foreign aid bill when it came up for renewal. It was adopted intact, the same as the prior year.

You see? There are ways to cut the deficit. Put all this together and we could balance the budget in a presidential term. There must be hundreds of other ways. If we can think of a few, you'd think the Clinton administration could come up with better ideas than raising the age for retirement benefits.