The President Retreats

If the president's budget was not good, Congress would have to make its own. But if it wanted to avoid Stockman's social spending cuts and management initiative fudging, Congress would have to cut defense and raise taxes just to attain President Reagan's figures—never mind reducing his deficit. A top Senate Democratic aide explained the box in which the legislators found themselves and the confinement's likely result:

If you start with wanting to have a balanced budget, anything you do that's real … it's gonna cost you. If you have honest numbers it raises the deficit. You have to cut spending more and raise taxes higher. The politicians' tendency, the whole system pushes them, to do what Stockman did, to jimmy the numbers.

Everything you have to do on the deficit is bad. It's a no-win situation for members of Congress. The president can go on TV and make speeches, but they have to vote. In the deficit era the whole budget process is just an albatross for members.

The incentive to fake it was greatest for those with most responsibility, not those with least.

The House would adopt some of that phony stuff because they had to govern. There was always this tension between the House and Senate [Democrats]. The House felt they had to govern. [Senate Democrats] said, hey, we're the minority, to hell with governing, they drove us out of office by saying they could balance the budget with tax cuts for Christ's sake!

Minorities are going to get beat on a partisan issue like the budget anyway. In neither house could they control either procedure or the votes necessary to make anything happen. No solution could occur without the majorities' support. But if the majority—House Democrats or Senate Republicans—knew what they wanted to do, it almost surely would involve pain for someone, so the minorities might as well let those who made the decision take the blame. Trying to reduce the strains within their own coalitions, the majorities, like Stockman, would be sorely tempted to jimmy either the numbers or the procedure. Because everybody was keeping score by total deficit, once one side cheated the others felt they had to as well just to keep up. Both sides would claim that had happened in 1981.