Editor's Notebook

f President Clinton has his way, taxpayers won't be writing checks any more to the Internal Revenue Service, but instead to the U.S. Treasury. Supposedly, this will ease some of the public's distaste for the IRS.

The change might also suggest to taxpayers that their hard-earned money is going not just to a government agency but to the broader enterprise suggested by the nation's initials. Why not extend the logic? Let's make our checks out to the United States of America.

This would send a message about the common purposes for which the union was created and for which taxes are levied: We are all in this together; we should engage in common enterprise; we should defend our national sovereignty; and we should lend a helping hand to those who need it. My brother Cameron Clark was wont to say that he was not taxed enough to serve these purposes.

Cameron was of a liberal bent, but even conservative theorists have been saying of late that we must recognize that one cannot love one's country and hate its government at the same time. We the people are the government, after all. E Pluribus Unum, as each American coin declares.

Speaking at a White House ceremony Feb. 2, President Clinton said of his budget: "We have done more than simply balance the budget, more than just line up numbers on a ledger. We have restored the balance of values in our policy, restored the balance of confidence between the government and the public."

I hope he is right. Confidence and trust have been at historic lows until recently. And to the extent that these sentiments are connected with the President's own personal peccadilloes, the trend cannot be positive.

But perhaps a balanced budget can produce a surplus of confidence. Under the President's proposal, both federal outlays and federal receipts would consume 20 percent of the gross domestic product in fiscal 1999. That seems a salubrious number: a fifth of our resources devoted to the common enterprise. Conservatives rail that taxation has never reached as high as 20 percent of GDP since 1945, at the end of World War II. On the other hand, they should be pleased that federal spending's role in the economy is down, from a level of 22 percent of GDP in 1990.

The common budget enterprise, one must note, has become an amalgamation of a few large and thousands of small endeavors, difficult to grasp as a coherent whole. Clinton is stuffing more into the budget closet: programs addressing the Internet, drunken driving, computer crimes, "super-efficient" cars, teacher training, class size, medical research, tobacco use, food safety, housing for welfare veterans, urban "empowerment zones," new border agents and night goggles for them, and more. E Pluribus the budget surely is, but the Unum is lost in the clutter.

In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with approval that Americans form associations to address common interests. He would be surprised today by the number of such groups and their myriad claims upon the public purse. But that's our modern nation, and we should be proud of it as we prepare to write our checks next month to The United States of America.