EDITORIAL : LESS THAN MEETS THE EYE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET PLAN WOULD RAISE SPENDING AND POSTPONE CUTS.

President Clinton's federal budget proposal for 1998 contains too little of what's needed and too much of what's not.

The plan he submitted Thursday would raise spending faster than inflation over the next three years, while postponing the major deficit-elimination chores until after he leaves office in four years.

Many of his proposed spending reductions are unspecified. In other words, they're hypothetical.

That would leave it up to his successor to do the actual budget balancing. So much for the Clinton claim of being ready to balance the budget.

He has no real solution to Medicare's problems. And his budget plan assumes the national economy is going to continue on a rosy course, uninterrupted - long enough, in fact, to rank as the longest recession-free growth period since World War II. Can it happen? Yes, it's possible. But to make the president's budget figures work, it's mandatory. Administration officials conceded that a recession would postpone the day when the budget actually is balanced.

The Clinton budget predicts an end to the years of red ink in 2002. That would be accomplished only if there are as-yet-unidentified cuts in programs and one-time sales of public assets such as radio frequencies, petroleum reserves and federal property rights. And it also would require that expenditures for certain new programs - ones the president proposes to initiate this year at a cost of billions of dollars over the next two or three years - would have to plummet from those levels down to zero in 2002. But how often do you see a government program with that kind of braking power?

Bottom line: These projections are a work of fiction. But we'll give the president this much - at least he talks as if he's willing to consider compromising with the Republican-led Congress.

On the heels of the clearly conservative message that voters sent in 1994, and with the message of cooperative bipartisanship voters sent in November, maybe there can be a greater commitment to civil discourse and principled compromise during this year's budget labor, instead of the government shutdowns the nation endured the last time around.