Budget Bloat

ALL GOOD politicians know the benefits of timing statements or events to maximize publicity. Better politicians know that there can be much utility in doing just the opposite.

Say you announce a complicated new program on a holiday. If you choose your holidays wisely, maybe pick one that follows a holi-night like New Year's Eve, chances are newspaper staffs, already working on holiday schedule and reeling from the previous night's revelry, won't be their usual analytical selves.

Thus on January 1 the Adminstration released its proposed budget for fiscal year 1988. This story got the big play it deserved. That same day, however, Education Department officials announced that the Administration would ask for a dramatic expansion of a student loan program that links repayment to the debtor's income. Sounds like a good idea.

At least that's how the Associated Press reported the story. Since it was New Year's Day and the budget story demanded lots of attention, many papers which ordinarily would have used their own reporters to cover the story--the Globe and Newsday, for instance--instead ran AP's version of it. The AP story made it seem that the Reagan Administration was doing something beneficial for college students not born with a silver fountain-pen in their breastpocket.

Could it be true? Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 promised to abolish the Department of Education as a waste of our tax dollars, doing something to encourage the middle and lower classes to attend college? Education Secretary William J. Bennett, who said he'd rather give his son seed money to start a business than tuition to go to Harvard, proposing to spend money so that elite schools will not soon only be educating elite students?

It was too good to be true. It wasn't. What the Administration is really doing--as a comprehensive New York Times article made clear--is trying to slash federal aid to students.

RISING COLLEGE costs and diminishing federal aid threaten to turn the American system of financing higher education into a national soap opera, "Graduates in Debt." A report released last week by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee warns that while student borrowing under federal programs has tripled in the last decade, federal grants and scholarships have decreased by 62 percent. This, the report says, threatens to overburden a generation of college graduates.

The Administration's response? Allow students to borrow even more and cut federal subsidization of educational expenses further. Under current loan programs, the government pays the interest on loans while students are still in college and subsidizes that interest rate after graduation. No more, if Reagan and Bennett have their way.

Under the new program, which will apply to all but the neediest, students will be able to borrow more money--up to $50,000--but at market rates. Worse, they must begin paying interest the day they receive their loans. Compared to the present inadequate programs, this new one is little better than loansharking with a human face.

THE CALLOUSNESS of the new policy is especially striking in comparison with the rest of the Administration's proposed budget. The government now spends $2 billion a year subsidizing student interest rates and loses $1 billion as a result of defaults. Big deal. This is not even a drop in the $1 trillion budget bucket.

The Administration would like to cut spending for education, employment and social services from $29.8 billion to $26.5 billion in the next five years and expand the already bloated military budget from $292 billion to $397 billion. That the Administration's priorities are so screwy is nothing new. Which is all the more reason that the press treat its pronouncements and proposals with a maximum of scrutiny and a minimum of carelessness--even when hung over.