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Searching for the Elusive Peace Dividend
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16938 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1990 |
2,342 Words |
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Donald Lambro
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As the once-mighty specter of Soviet and Eastern European communism is being swept away by wave after wave of demands for democracy and freedom, the focus of America's budget debate has shifted to cutting its huge and costly military arsenal.
President Bush has further fueled that debate by offering a defense budget for fiscal 1991 whose rate of growth does not even keep up with inflation, as well as by unexpectedly proposing to cut U.S. troop strength in Western Europe far deeper than he had proposed last May.
Indeed, the historic and rapidly unfolding reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have sent defense planners back to the drawing boards to recraft the nation's long-range national security needs accordingly. Defense Secretary Richard Cheney has even suggested that his budget could be cut by tens of billions of dollars in the first half of this decade alone and has ordered contingency budgets prepared that would do just that.
As a further result of significantly improved relations with the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - retired Gens. David C. Jones and John W. Vessey, Jr., and retired Adm. William J. Crowe, Jr. - have unanimously recommended to Congress that the MX and Midgetman missile systems be scuttled. Little wonder, then, that Democratic congressional leaders such as House Speaker Thomas Foley are openly saying that the Pentagon will be the No.1 budget-cutting target in Congress' efforts to reach the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction goal of $64 billion in the coming fiscal year.
Thus, suddenly, the talk on Capitol Hill is of the "peace dividend" - estimated at anywhere from $40 billion to $70 billion or more over the coming decade - and how it will spent. Not surprisingly, there are as many recommendations on how to spend it as there are interest groups and lawmakers in Washington - with all of their proposals totaling more than $200 billion la year. Among them:
· Sen. Phill Gramm of Texas, the chief author of the budget-cutting law that bears his name, wants to use the peace dividend to give back to the American people some of the income taxes they have paid in the postwar era to keep America militarily strong. Gramm's "perestroika tax cuts" would include cutting the capital gains tax rate over several years as defense savings are realized, ending the law requiring that Social Security checks to retirees be cut when additional income is earned, expanding research and development tax breaks, and enacting "enterprise zone" tax incentives to help spur new investment and jobs in America's poorest inner cities.
"Since the end of World War II, the American people have worked and sacrificed to pay for America's defense and that of the free world," Gramm has said. "Now, it's only fair that when spending cuts can be realized in our defenses, that some of those dividends should be returned to the taxpayers."
· Improving health care programs will be a top priority in the coming years. A phalanx of government, business, and labor groups will be offering proposals to provide health insurance for the 30 million Americans who do not have it, as well as long-term health care for the elderly. John Rother, legislative
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