OPEN LETTER MUSES ON THE GREAT BUDGET FIASCO OF 1990

Honorable John C. Danforth

United States Senator

Washington, D.C.

Dear Jack:

We always enjoy seeing you and hearing about your work, and consequently were disappointed to have missed you when you dropped by our office back in October. What follows are a few thoughts I'd like to have shared with you on that occasion. Please excuse the uncommon length.

You are aware of my exceedingly high regard for the rare quality of your public service. With a "go-fer" summer job that paid me $500 in 1972, you provided me with my first opportunity to see public affairs and political campaigns up close. My regard for you, like my gratitude to you, would be difficult to measure. What follows should be understood in that context.

Your visit to Cape followed by just a few days the completion of the debacle that has come to be known as the "federal budget process." I note that both you and Missouri's junior Senator reluctantly voted for the package agreed to by the President's representatives and congressional negotiators. Also, that you both had voted for the earlier budget package that went down to a House defeat, when majorities of both parties said "No."

I further noted with dismay that on the occasion of the first vote, you were quoted as saying that, "House Republicans have it in their power to wreck the nation's economy" by voting against the budget package the negotiators produced.

Now, most of us out here feel that package, for a host of reasons, was not merely a bad one, but a terrible one. May we agree that that comment was a bit of exaggeration, spawned as tempers and patience grew short, and sessions long by the heat of the moment? Or may we agree, at the very least, that it was the statement of a senator with four years to go before he next faces the voters in an election?

The package finally agreed to, like the first one defeated in the House, contained gas tax increases, farm program cuts, and Medicare cuts, among other difficult adjustments. To take just one, let's discuss the gas tax.

I am one who, despite a well-honed aversion to tax hikes, believes that we need higher fuel taxes, in Missouri and perhaps nationally for the specific and strictly limited purpose of building roads and bridges. I don't think we're investing enough in what the public policy types call our infrastructure, either in Missouri or at the federal level.

I was disappointed in 1987 a time of cheap gasoline when state leaders asked for Proposition A, a mere four-cents-per-gallon increase. At 11 cents per gallon today, Missouri still has the nation's lowest gas tax. That tax must support the nation's seventh largest road system. Thus Proposition A is indeed merely a "glorified resurfacing program" Highway Commission Chairman Woody Cozad's phrase and not a serious plan for the 21st century. The arguments for doing more are familiar, and well-understood by a public that believes its road money has been well spent in Missouri. A fuel tax is a user fee, and people have shown they'll go for that, etc.

But we all know the new federal gas tax is absolutely not for roads and bridges; it will not go into the Highway Trust Fund; it's for something Washington calls "deficit reduction". And just as ordinary Missourians of every political persuasion support building roads and bridges with highway user fee money, they are overwhelmingly opposed to this "budget reform", or "deficit reduction" package, believing, with some historical justification, that it's another inside-the-Beltway scam.

We who follow such things have seen this "deficit reduction" federal gas tax coming for about three years now. We all know Wayne Muri is among the nation's most highly respected professional highway engineers. Wayne and various commissioners have repeatedly warned Missourians of this, and of the "camel's nose under the tent" that a gas tax supposedly dedicated to "deficit reduction" would mean. It means the beginning of the end for serious funding of road and bridge projects. This new "deficit reduction" gas tax will be raised again and again. The federal government's voracious appetite for revenue means a pre-emption of any chance we might have had to go to the voters for more money for our own vital needs.

Among those informed Missourians who know what is at stake, and who know the real meaning of this singular act of federal preemption, I don't think the word "bitterness" is too strong to describe our attitudes. Not bitterness at you personally, but rather toward a federal Leviathan that never seems to respond to anything short of a two-by-four square between the eyes.

I note that almost every Member of Congress who supported the budget agreement(s) did so while figuratively holding his nose. Goes the refrain: "the people sent us here to make hard choices"; "anyone can pick apart the agreement"; and finally, the old standard: "we must govern."

The case of Rep. Jack Buechner of St. Louis County (who voted for the budget agreement) is instructive. A stunned Buechner, his jocular, cavalier attitude a fading memory, was still sounding that "we must govern" line a week after the election. His narrow defeat has now survived a recount, and in a few days he'll watch his virtually unknown Democratic challenger sworn in to represent Missouri's most Republican congressional district. She will get her opportunity "to govern", as would any newly elected liberal, feminist Democrat CongressPerson.

Jack Buechner will enjoy a unique perspective as an ex-Member of Congress, back at his Chesterfield law office. I look forward to his Op-Ed pieces in the Post. I note that your colleague Rudy Boschwitz was the only incumbent senator to fall in the election; he too, had backed the budget agreements and its tax hikes on working people.

Those working people sent Buechner, Boschwitz and and all of you a message. Has it been received?

I do not believe that either you or Kit Bond could have been reelected mouthing platitudes about how "we must govern", had you faced the voters days or weeks after voting for a package so full of noxious provisions. And one that, despite claims to the contrary, will not "reduce" the "deficit"; at best, it will merely restrain what would otherwise be even faster growth in federal spending. My own guess is that deficits will now explode.

This is getting long, but I haven't reached the larger point, which goes far beyond who wins this or that election, who represents this or that district. What does the Republican Party stand for? Anything at all, beyond "we must govern"?

Where would the GOP take America? Why should Middle America the great, center-right grouping that came to be, during the '80s, the New American Majority of Reagan-Bush voters why should they continue trusting the Republican Party with power? Why should anyone care who its candidates are, or what causes they espouse? Have the lessons of the 1980s' unparalleled political and economic successes been forgotten tossed away like last month's polling numbers?

In Monday's edition: The improbable rise and stunning success of Ronald Reagan; a GOP Establishment that never understood him; and a post-Reagan GOP that is rapidly losing its hold on the American people.