LET STATES HAVE CONTROL

Alice Rivlin, who is slated to be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget in President Clinton's administration, has a terrific idea. She wants the federal government to return to the states responsibilities it has been usurping since the 1960s. The proposal came in a book she wrote two years ago just before she joined the Clinton administration.

Rivlin's book, "Reviving the American Dream," states her thesis in these apt words: "Washington has neither the managerial capacity nor the grass-roots support to simultaneously create a federal budget surplus, reform health financing and implement the productivity agenda -- while also managing increasingly demanding international responsibilities. It would be better to divide the job."

Among the federal programs she would like to see completely "devolved to the states: elementary and secondary education, job training, economic and community development, housing, most highways and other transportation, social services and some pollution control programs." To that list should certainly be added crime control, even though the Clinton administration is dedicated to making this historically local responsibility another federal mandate.

Rivlin is convinced that this is the path to getting the federal budget under control and to finally bringing a halt to huge deficits as far as they eye can see. The changes she advocates would cut federal spending by $75 billion.

It is true, as critics say, that states would need to find additional revenues in some cases, but to this criticism there are at least two answers. One is that states would be free of many burdensome federal mandates. The other is that states have consistently proven better fiscal managers than has the federal government. This is in part because of constitutional restraints mandating balanced budgets, and in part because they cannot print money as the federal government does.

Rivlin awaits an easy Senate confirmation. We wish her well in selling her superb idea to an administration that, to this point, would seem to have little use for it.