Authorizers Balk At Herculean Task Of Finding Kasich His Savings
By Andrew Taylor, CQ Staff Writer
House GOP leaders finally passed their long-overdue budget plan, but that does not mean the Republican faithful are any closer to delivering an election-year tax cut to the voters.
Next comes a more difficult task: constructing and passing a so-called budget-reconciliation bill to turn House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich's non-binding budget blueprint (HCONRES284) into law.
Budget reconciliation -- the process that implemented last year's budget -- requires the authorizing committees, which make policy, to produce savings from mandatory programs that can then be used to cut taxes. Under the terms of the Kasich plan, the authorizing committees would have three weeks to produce $55 billion in five-year savings.
They cannot do it, say senior staff aides. Asked whether the Banking and Financial Services Committee could cut funding for flood insurance, a senior GOP committee aide said: "It's going to be very hard."
How about charging airlines fees on takeoff and landing slots ($2.5 billion) or increasing fees on the federal inland waterway system ($2 billion)? "None of those ideas have ever gone anywhere in the House or Senate," said a House Republican staff aide to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
The problem bedeviling Kasich, R-Ohio, is that almost all the politically viable savings were grabbed by last year's budget bill (PL 105-33). Most of what is left over was claimed by the big highway bill (HR2400) that is on President Clinton's desk or by an agriculture research and food stamp bill (S1150) that the House cleared June 4. That takes about $15 billion in savings envisioned by Kasich off the table.
What is left? The big pots of mandatory spending include such politically sensitive programs as Medicare, welfare and Medicaid. They are not going to face cuts in an election year, said a top Senate Budget Committee staff aide. If anything, the pressure is to reverse small parts of the 1996 welfare overhaul law (PL 104-193) by, for example, restoring food stamp benefits to the most vulnerable legal immigrants.
"They're not going to cut Medicare. What else is there?" queries the aide.
With mandatory savings so elusive, Kasich is seeking $46 billion in cuts in discretionary spending -- the one-third of the budget doled out by the Appropriations committees each year -- to finance tax cuts.
Even if appropriators would accept that, which is unlikely, it is against the rules to use cuts in appropriations to offset tax cuts. It would permit Senate Democrats to kill the reconciliation bill on a point of order.
© 1998 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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