A SUGGESTION TO THE PRESIDENT ABOUT CUTTING THE BUDGET

President Clinton sent his $1.52 trillion 1995 fiscal year budget to Congress last Monday, trumpeting what he called the trimmest plan since Harry S. Truman. The reaction was swift, in fact, so swift that some Capitol Hill Democrats had started complaining about "excessive budget cuts" even before the plan was officially unveiled. How convenient for the president, who desperately wants to be seen as a budget cutter after last year championing the largest tax increase in American history.

Unfortunately, the real meaning of the 2,013-page, four-volume plan is not as good as it sounds; it cuts defense spending to the bone, increases Clinton priority programs dramatically, holds a few minor programs constant or cuts them slightly, and does not include health care and welfare reform.

Of course, this last tactic was dealt a serious blow Wednesday, when the Clinton-friendly Congressional Budget Office (obviously embarrassed) declared that Mr. Clinton's health care plan should be included in the budget. In fact, not only should the plan be included in the budget, the CBO said, but it would drive the deficit $78 billion higher over the next six years if implemented. That's in contrast to the president's claim that his plan would cut the deficit by $58 billion -- a mistake by Mr. Clinton of, oh, at least $132 billion.

Maybe the president's sanguine response to the CBO's unexpected ray of honesty about his health care plan indicates that he is rethinking the costs of the government taking over 14 percent of the U.S. economy through bureaucratic coercion. But somehow we doubt it.

Mr. Clinton justifies calling his $1,518,300,000,000 budget plan trim by claiming that he "has frozen discretionary spending." In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reports, "spending on favored Clinton 'discretionary' items actually goes up by abut 8 percent from 1993-1995, and even more in the future." The reason total discretionary spending is about the same is because Mr. Clinton would cut defense by some $33 billion. This would bring U.S. defense spending by 1997 down to 3.3 percent of the economy, the lowest it's been since 1940. Maybe that is what Mr. Clinton was referring to when he mentioned Harry Truman -- although he would have had his dates off by at least five years. (Then again, numbers haven't gotten in the way of his health care proposal.)

Let's look at just a few of the Clinton budget cuts. First of all, there's the line about "Payment to Legal Services Corporation," which is, according to the Wall Street Journal, a sort of subsidy for lawyers. This budget item actually goes up 25 percent in a year (eight times the rate of inflation). Then there's "Homeless Programs," up 85 percent according to the St. Louis Post; "Investment Company Guarantees," up 200 percent; "EPA Green Programs," up 35 percent; and the "Climate Change Action Plan," up 1,223 percent. "One stop Career Shopping" goes up 500 percent; "Mass Transit Formula Grants" go up 60 percent; Clinton's "National Service Initiative" goes up 67 percent.

We don't want to be unfair. Besides defense spending, there (ital) are (unital) other areas the president proposes to cut. The problem is that the president's program eliminations amount to only about one-fifth of one percent of the federal budget. In fact, for all of the sound and fury about budget cuts coming out of the White House these days, we'd just like to point out that the president is proposing to spend $34.3 billion MORE in 1995 than this year. That would push the budget to a record level. And it doesn't include the president's own plans for health care.

This leads us to a simple point. The president didn't just talk about raising taxes last year, he raised them. If he now wants to be seen as a budget cutter, then he should cut the budget. Dabbling with one fifth of one percent doesn't mean much.