Go Ahead - Make My Day

"I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers. Go ahead--make my day."

--Ronald Reagan, to the American Business Conference

The threat was one that Reagan had voiced many times before. But the words, echoing a celebrated Clint Eastwood line, marked a new high in cocky combativeness, even for a President who has never been exactly deficient in that quality. Both the business executives who greeted the dare with applause and laughter and the members of the Senate Budget Committee at whom it was aimed were aware that Reagan was mockingly embracing the very swaggering-cowboy image his detractors have long been trying to pin on him.*

The line was accompanied by some less public but even sharper whip cracking. Before the President spoke, his aides had begun passing a disconcerting message to the 22 Republican Senators who will be up for re-election in 1986. Its essence: how much help Reagan gives them now in raising campaign funds, and later by making speaking tours through their states, will depend heavily on how much they cooperate in shaping a fiscal-1986 budget to the President's liking.

The pressures had some effect. The Senate Budget Committee had already rejected two proposals to raise taxes before Reagan's speech, but it also voted down a resolution embodying Reagan's proposals. Only hours after his talk, though, it began passing considerably deeper cuts in non-military spending than it had been willing to accept before. Finally, the committee's Republicans pushed through on a party-line vote of 11 to 9 a resolution aimed at slashing projected outlays next fiscal year by $55 billion, to $966 billion --a slightly deeper reduction than the White House had asked. Said Wisconsin Senator Robert Kasten, one of the Republicans

preparing for a 1986 campaign: "President Reagan should feel we have done our best."

But in Reagan's view that "best" is sure to seem nowhere near good enough. The resolution provides $11 billion less for the Pentagon than the White House wants, and it merely reduces some programs the President wants to eliminate, such as mass-transit subsidies and revenue-sharing grants to cities (revenue sharing would expire in two years under the Senate plan). So Reagan will have ample opportunity in future congressional battles to display the uncompromising spirit he showed last week. There seems little doubt that he will.