Why no compromise?

AS THE budget/deficit debate rattles on endlessly without any measurable progress, many of us are tempted to throw up our hands and ask: Why can't the two sides come to some reasonable compromise? Why won't the Reaganauts agree to trade off one dollar of new taxes for two or three dollars of spending cuts? Wouldn't they come out ahead?

This oft-posed question has a while series of answers. Here is one. All "tax hikes" realy hike taxes, but many "spending cuts" are only promises or intentions or yearnings to cut spending. A tax hike passes into statutory law at a given instant, but a budget resolution, like a New Year's resolution, need not bind the maker. Congress if famous, for example, for achieving "cuts" in the food-stamp program simply by underestimating the amount the program will cost; when the money runs out nine months into the fiscal year, it is then forced to pass a supplemental appropriation, budget resolution or no. In many programs, the lawmakers have given recipients a legal right to sue if the money is not forthcoming.

Put differently, tax hikes are typically permanent while spending cuts tend to be at best temporary. Imagine a hostage exchange in which a named prisoner is traded for a pledge of, say, lifelong good behavior by the other side. This is the equivalent of a budget deal in which a tax hike is enacted in exchange for a pledge to do away permanently with a chunk of spending. It is much easier to come back in a couple of years and reinstate the spending than to repeal the tax.

There is one sort of spending cut that might serve as the basis of a real, rather than a spurious, compromise, becuase it carries some of the same finality as a tax hike. That occurs when Congress changes an underlying statute so as to curtail eligibility for a benefit or cut back on an agency's official mission. And that is the one sort of cut that Tip O'Neill's Democracts are least willing to consider, which is one reason the budget standoff continues.