FEDERAL TAX-SPEND PLAN CUTS TOO THINLY

A Republican-sponsored budget plan won narrow approval in the House of Representatives that cuts both spending and taxes over the next five years. Approval of the fiscal year 1999 budget of $1.72 trillion came on a near party line vote. Of 435 members, only nine Republicans opposed it, while only three Democrats backed it.

The budget bill is an outline of priorities for taxing and spending. With this vote, the House majority declared it is continuing the GOP's drive to pare taxes and domestic programs, despite annual surpluses that are virtually certain to begin this year. The bill also contains a call to erase the so-called marriage penalty, the extra income tax millions of couples pay that they wouldn't pay if single. This is a high priority of Republican-allied pro-family groups.

Ahead lie potentially tumultuous negotiations with the Senate, which approved a more modest spending plan two months ago that mapped out a pitiful $30 billion in tax cuts and none of the House's spending cuts. Surely, the final product of the GOP Congress should more closely resemble the House version, and not the timid Senate plan. President Clinton has also denounced the Republican plan, and another clash with him looms in the fall.

Truth be told, even the House plan of about a hundred billion in tax cuts over five years isn't nearly enough. A mere hundred billion dollars of tax cuts, stretched over five years in a $6 trillion economy, with an annual federal budget steadily growing toward $1.8 trillion, is a trifling sum. From a Republican Congress elected four years ago, it is acceptable only if understood as merely this year's installment in five or six consecutive years of tax cuts. This is what Speaker Newt Gingrich has promised as his goal. Rank-and-file GOP House members will forget this at their peril. Voters should take every opportunity to remind them of what they sent this Congress up there to do.