WASHINGTON — Where is Ross Perot now that we need him?
That was the thought that crossed my mind when the Bush administration announced last week that the budget deficit for the current year would hit a record $455 billion and grow next year to $475 billion.
Josh Bolten, the new budget director, pronounced the deficits "manageable," but almost everyone who is not directly engaged in defending them found the long-term implications of the massive borrowing scary as hell. The Concord Coalition, a bipartisan budgetary watchdog group, gave Congress and the administration an "F" on fiscal policy, saying it was characterized by "deficits, deception and denial."
"More alarming than the growing short-term deficit," its report said, "is policy-makers’ growing willingness to justify deficits of this size as ‘moderate and manageable.’ "
Carol Cox Wait, the Republican president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget since it was founded in 1981 to battle "the specter of historically large, seemingly endless, structural budget deficits," chose last week to announce her resignation, explaining, "I have been there and done that."
And the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) said that even if the economy recovers in the next year, as the administration assumes, annual budget deficits will not come down below $300 billion — and then balloon after 2008 when the baby-boom retirees begin draining Medicare and Social Security.
With lots of data, all these groups argue, as CBPP puts it, "The current fiscal policy path is neither manageable nor sustainable."
That was true of the deficits that built up under Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush — but then, as now, the figures were so enormous and the discipline so lacking at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue that the public threw up its hands in exasperation.
Until Ross Perot, the eccentric Texas businessman, turned his quixotic 1992 presidential campaign into a TV seminar on the fatal consequences of runaway deficits. By buying half-hour chunks of prime time, and using simple charts to illustrate his folksy translations of economic jargon, he brought home to people the fundamental indecency of saddling the next generation of Americans with staggering debt because of our unwillingness to pay our bills.
Bill Clinton, who had started his campaign that year by promising a middle-class tax cut, caught the shift in public opinion and launched his presidency with a call for tighter fiscal policy — including a top-bracket tax increase. Republicans, who for 12 years had enthusiastically cheered the fatal combination of tax cuts and big defense and domestic spending increases, also came to their senses. When they took over Congress in 1994, their freshmen invited Perot to an early caucus and they launched a drive for balanced budgets that Clinton had no choice but to join.
And for a few brief years at the end of the 1990s, we enjoyed a "virtuous cycle" of budget surpluses that reduced the national debt and the government’s annual interest payments. But now both are spinning out of control again.
So we need another Perot — not as an independent presidential candidate, but as an explainer with enough financial backing to commandeer TV time and enough political smarts to put it in ways that all of us can understand.
I can think of a couple people right away who fit the bill, and maybe they could combine their talents. One is Warren Rudman, the independent-minded former senator from New Hampshire, a Republican who wrestled with budget issues on Capitol Hill in the 1980s and now is co-chairman of the Concord Coalition.
The other is Leon Panetta, the equally independent-minded California Democrat who, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Clinton administration budget director and later White House chief of staff, had hands-on experience in bringing down the deficits.
I haven’t broached this notion to either man, and both of them are plenty busy with other projects. But I have to believe that if super-investor Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, the Microsoft honcho, Sandy Weill, the retiring CEO of Citigroup, Bob Rubin, the former treasury secretary and Wall Street powerhouse, and others like them — including Perot — raised the money for such a media campaign, Rudman and Panetta would seize the opportunity.
They know that this is not a matter of partisanship, but a problem that can cripple the future for our children and grandchildren and compromise this country’s ability to play its role in the world.
The way to change the government’s policy, as Perot demonstrated, is to inform the people — and let them tell their leaders what must be done.
We’re at that point again.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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