That Monster Deficit

(11 of 11)
are to national security. The Administration had no immediate response, and Wright complained that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger "considers everything in his budget absolutely indispensable."

Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii said that if Administration officials did not provide more specific suggestions/Congress might take budget-cutting action on its own.

The deficit dilemma facing the U.S. is a problem inherent in free societies. Democratic governments around the world have found it easy to give out favors and almost impossible to take them back. Writes Samuel Brittan, a British economic commentator, in his new book The Role and Limits of Government: "Each of us wants the benefit of services while transferring the cost to some other group; we evade the problem of deciding who should be the loser."

That predicament is complicated in the U.S. by the rapid-fire pace of elections.

Voting day is never more than two years away for 468 of the 535 U.S. lawmakers.

Unfortunately, the business cycle has no respect for the political cycle. If Congress and the White House insist on avoiding until 1985 the difficult measures needed to control the deficit, the chance to keep the recovery going and assure the future health of the U.S. economy may slip irretrievably away. —By Charles P. Alexander. Reported by David Beckwith, Gisela Bolte and Neil MacNeil/Washington