Phantom Surplus

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The most interesting thing about the phantom surplus is that by every indication, voters don't think it really exists either. But that has not prevented politicians on both sides from trying to woo them with proposals that Washington can't pay for. Republicans fanned out during their August recess to try to rally public support for their tax cuts--Please, let us give you more money!--but the polls showed a public unmoved. Voters said they would rather use the money, if it exists, to pay down the $5.6 trillion national debt. "People are genuinely fiscally conservative in this country," says Stephen Moore, an irrepressible supply-sider from the Cato Institute. Though personally he'd prefer deep tax cuts to spur growth, he finds in his travels that "a lot of people look at this mountain of debt and say, 'Gee, we really ought to start paying off the mortgage.' And the public really is onto this gambit of stealing from the trust funds."

Last week House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Lott acknowledged that the tax cut was dead for 1999. Unlike some G.O.P. moderates, Lott claimed he wasn't interested in a compromise--a little more spending for Clinton, a smaller tax cut for the G.O.P. Better to have the issue to take to voters next year. That suits most Democrats fine: Al Gore never misses a chance to denounce the G.O.P.'s "risky tax-cut scheme" and to promise that education and health care would have priority over tax cuts if the Democrats had their way. The only Democrat it may not suit is Clinton, for whom this budget is the last opportunity to get anything done that might count as a legacy.

But that leaves the immediate problem of the spending bills. Republicans who were around in 1995 are still spooked by Clinton's ability to put the blame on Congress if the government shuts down. So they are finding even more creative ways to slip programs over, under or around the caps. The census, which under the Constitution has occurred every 10 years since 1790, has been classified for 2000 as an emergency, along with at least $25 billion in other programs, because the 1997 caps exempted emergency spending. That exemption was supposed to cover things like floods and hurricanes, but floods of red ink and bad press apparently count too.

None of the options are pretty. Lawmakers will probably pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running at least past the presidential primaries and hope that some extra money falls from the skies by next January, after economists have recalculated the surplus. And in the meantime, through the messy magic of democracy, the public actually gets what it wants: the President has to wait for new spending; the Republicans have to put off their tax cuts; and as the months roll by, any surplus that actually materializes goes into paying down the debt. It's enough to make the title "The Do-Nothing Congress" a badge of honor.

--Reported by James Carney/Washington