Fiscal conservative Grams keeps a wary eye on federal budget

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 9, 1998 | by Stephen Goode, | Rick Kozak

Minnesota Republican Sen. Rod Grams is the North Star State's standard-bearer for a fiscally responsible budget. He also has some ideas on what to do with Social Security and Medicare.

Minnesota Republican Sen. Rod Grams grew up on a 280-acre dairy farm in Princeton, about 50 miles north of the Twin Cities. He has been a prominent TV news anchor in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but his days as a dairy farmer were formative: "You're every morning at 4:30 and into the barn by fifteen to five," he tells Insight.

Dairy farming also teaches frugality, Grams says, but adds laughingly, "My sister says she frugal and I'm cheap!" Grams is a fiscal conservative from a state known for such great progressives as Hubert Humphrey. What this shows, he says, is "that there been kind of a turn in Minnesota that means people are getting concerned about how government is taking more and more of their money and they're receiving less and less." He believes this is true, too, of the nation as a whole -- hence his concern about getting a federal budget that's not `full of the smoke and mirrors of the last 40 years that hide exactly what it is we're doing."

Insight: We're hearing a lot of talk about "reinventing government" from President Clinton and Vice President Gore. Is any reinventing going on?

Rod Grams: What they're saying is, "Reinvent government in my image." If it's President Clinton's or Al Gore's image, it's just a bigger government that spends more money. They really-haven't done a lot. They said they've gotten rid of some agencies but, out of 110,000 line items in the budget, they've gotten rid of 250, and those have been so small that no one even knows what they were.

I would like to see a candidate really come out and talk about reforming the federal government, not just putting your arms around it and kissing it to death, but a candidate who would come up and say, "We're going to do something with Social Security! And, we're going to do something with Medicare or Medicaid: We're going to put it into the private sector." There can be government support for it, but we are going to face the problem and solve it in the marketplace. With Medicare, I would like to see people who need care provided with a voucher so they can buy insurance in the private sector.

Reinventing government -- it's been a good cliche. But when they say government is the smallest it's been in 35 years -- well, 35 years ago it was $100 billion a year; now it's $1.75 trillion.

The president has outright lied to the American people if he says the government now is smaller and more efficient. If that's their idea of reinvention, we are in big trouble.

Insight: What tops your agenda right now?

RG: Of course the budget has always been my main concern. We've been working to try to make sure we hold down spending. At the same time, I think we've got to have additional tax relief And we've got to begin repaying the debt.

I can see it's going to be an uphill battle because already the president is spending money that's not even there yet and, when we're starting to spend on the perception of a surplus, that's not being financially responsible.

Insight: One of the major sources of cynicism about Washington is budget talk. So much of it sounds like smoke-and-mirrors gobbledygook that nobody understands.

RG: I try to put it into real simple terms and I always tell people that everything that they do in their private lives hinges around their budget. If they want to send their kids to school, if they want to buy a bigger or better house or if they need another automobile or take a vacation, it all depends on what their budget allows them to do.

It's the same way with government. We can talk about education, about the environment, about transportation, but if we don't have the budget to do it, if we don't want to put our kids deeper in debt, how are we going to manage it? That's why the budget is at the center of everything.

So I always try to feel when I'm here [in Washington] that I'm trying to spend the taxpayers' money as if it were my own. Many times I use the analogy that if you were going to go out to dinner tonight and I gave you my credit card, you probably would spend a lot more than you would if you were going to pay for it yourself, and that's the way Washington is. We're on somebody else's credit card, and I don't think that's the way things are.

Insight: Speaking of living within a budget, you've also been very concerned about the fate of Social Security.

RG: We've been talking about Social Security in my office for five years! It's always been that dangerous third rail they didn't want you to touch, but now everyone is talking about it.

We've introduced a bill to see that every taxpayer will be given information on their Social Security benefits. Now, if you're a 25-year-old person and working and expect to make average money and you're making an average contribution, the government will tell you that when you retire you'll get $98,989 a year in benefits--because they're calculating all the inflation expected.