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Babbitt, the only candidate offering a realistic plan for serious deficit reductions, is at once more fiscally conservative than Ronald Reagan and more rigorously progressive than Walter Mondale. Babbitt proposes to shrink the Federal Government to a size Americans are willing to pay for out of pocket: without borrowing, driving up interest rates and choking the economy. He would accomplish this mainly by "needs-testing" social spending so that more goes to the poor rather than to the upper and middle classes, who now consume nearly a third of the federal budget. He would, for example, raise taxes on Social Security benefits for couples earning more than $32,000 a year. "Just as we have had progressive income taxes, we should have progressive Government benefits," Babbitt explains. "Why should the Mellons and the Vanderbilts get the same benefits as a widow living in a cold-water flat?" While cutting entitlement spending, Babbitt would impose a 5% "consumption" tax, basically a national sales tax, which would exempt necessities like food.
On the stump, Babbitt occasionally asks his listeners to stand up if they want their taxes raised or their Government benefits cut. "No takers? Well, let me put it another way," he says, pointing to a young girl in the audience. "How many of you are willing to pick her pocket, just so our generation can consume more than it's willing to pay for?" The line often gets good response, which Babbitt takes as evidence that the "voters know we can't keep spending our children's inheritance."
Babbitt's own inheritance included an expensive and eclectic education and a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Where he grew up, the name Babbitt seldom reminded anyone of the bourgeois conformist of the Sinclair Lewis novel; rather, in Flagstaff, Ariz., it meant roughly what Rockefeller does in New York. Arriving a century ago in Flagstaff, a logging and ranching town south of the Grand Canyon, five Babbitt brothers turned a modest grubstake into a mercantile empire. As Bruce came of age, his family owned the grocery, drugstore and icehouse; a lumberyard and sawmill; and owned or controlled nearly a million acres of ranchland. They were landlords to half the town and employers to half the rest.
They were also Catholic, which in that place and time meant they were not only inclined but well advised to share their bounty with those less fortunate and to wield their power with discretion. A boyhood chum, Bruce Leadbetter, says one reason Bruce Babbitt is uncomfortable addressing crowds is that "his family always emphasized leading quietly, influencing people, not jumping up on a box and talking down to them."
Babbitt studied geology at Notre Dame and as a Marshall scholar in England. On a field trip to Bolivia, however, he got his first look at Third World poverty and experienced an epiphany. "I was doing fascinating research, but meanwhile we were surrounded by this incredible squalor," Babbitt says. Suddenly rocks seemed unimportant.