Gramm-Rudman Game of Chicken

It was as if two football captains, meeting to shake hands before the kickoff, tackled each other instead. Congressional leaders had come down to the White House last week to talk over the year ahead on Capitol Hill, when the two principal players, President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neill, began sniping across the deep ideological divide between them. After the Republican President seemed to imply that some people were jobless simply because they were lazy, the Democratic Speaker exploded. He charged that Reagan's economic notions are a "bunch of baloney" that might "go over big at the country club" but...