COLUMN RIGHT / JAMES P. PINKERTON : Deficit Storm Raining Scuds on Washington : The mood in the land is to cut. If Clinton won’t, he’s out.

In the comedy film “Dave,” Kevin Kline, playing the stand-in who becomes President, has to find a way to cut $650 million from the federal budget. The White House staff tells him there’s no way, so Dave calls in his accountant from back home. The two amateurs sit with their spreadsheets and calculators and identify the cuts in an afternoon. Audiences cheer. Why? Because people recognize the essential truth of the scene. Cutting $650 million is cutting less than half of 1% of all federal spending. That’s nothing. Anything--from our waistlines to our telephone bills--could be reduced by .5% with just a little discipline.

Shakespeare made frequent use of the “wise fool,” the character who was crazy enough to speak the truth. Today, federal spending is so bloated that any fool can cut spending. As Ross Perot might say, “It’s the simplest thing in the world.”

Milton Friedman has a radical recommendation. The Nobel Prize-winning economist spoke recently to the Cato Institute in Washington and suggested that federal programs be put to a popular vote. Call it the “line-item referendum.” Crazy idea? We don’t know if the public can be trusted to manage the government, but we do know that the politicians and bureaucrats we have now can’t handle it. Washington isn’t even trying. Federal spending has increased 500% in the past 20 years. What did we get for all those trillions? Worse services, higher taxes and still 12-digit deficits.

President Clinton was elected as an outsider, but evidently he accepts the insiders’ argument that federal spending is “uncontrollable.” Thus, on top of a $250-billion tax increase, the Administration recommends that we add another trillion dollars to the deficit. The quarterbacks for the Clinton tax-and-spend plan are House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) and Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). In spite of their combined 75 years of congressional seniority, Rostenkowski and Byrd are determined to end government-as-usual. NOT!

It didn’t take long for Clinton to be seduced by Washington, did it? Look what has happened to Clinton’s plan for axing even the tiny honey subsidy: It’s gummed up in Congress. Clinton seems to be too busy noshing with Sharon Stone to notice. But the word is out: If the beekeepers can keep their welfare payments, then who can’t? The good times will continue to roll for the mohair growers, space-station builders and HUD-financed slumlords, courtesy of Uncle Sugar.

Friedman’s referendum idea is a 2-by-4 designed more to get the attention of the stubborn Beltway mules than to do anything constructive. Let’s hope that in their anger, the voters don’t swing so hard that they crack the country’s constitutional skull.

Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the House minority whip, supports a less blunt instrument. He is pushing a non-binding “national advisory referendum” on the federal budget, starting in 1994. Gingrich argues that such a vote would focus attention on what the public really cares about: spending and the deficit. “If the Russians can use a referendum to mobilize support for Boris Yeltsin’s reforms,” he asks, “then why shouldn’t American voters be able to do the same thing?”

Out beyond the Washington pleasure dome, a storm is brewing. It was a restless, cynical electorate that spawned Proposition 13 and the tax revolt, term limits and the Perot campaign. Clinton should be thinking about the fate of the last President who let the Congress talk him into raising taxes and still spent a trillion more than he took in.

Young people in particular are angry. It’s slowly dawning on the MTV-watching 20-somethings of Generation X that they will be left holding the red-ink bag when the rest of us are golden oldies. To them, Clinton’s $16-billion stimulus package was just more hair of the same grody dog. They want righteous deficit reduction--$100 billion, $200 billion, even $300 billion a year--right here, right now.

The Perot-inspired youth group “Lead or Leave” is conducting teach-ins on deficit reduction. Co-founder Jon Cowan reports that students support deep cuts in everything from farm programs to foreign aid to Medicare. Watch for “rock the deficit” rallies on campuses this fall.

Smart politicians will pay attention. They see the Clinton presidency as the last hurrah for big government. The next wave of political winners will mobilize the public’s overwhelming support for deficit reduction to overcome the special interests that snared Clinton so quickly.