Clinton Launches Bitter Attack on Oil Companies in Fight Over Tax : Budget: He charges that lobbyists are trying to kill the energy levy and make the poor and elderly pay more for deficit reduction.

By JOHN M. BRODER

May 23, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

STRATHAM, N.H. — President Clinton on Saturday appealed for support for his economic package and bluntly attacked the oil industry, which he charged is lobbying intensively to kill his proposed energy tax.

“It’s simply wrong for a powerful interest to try and opt out of this program by asking the elderly and the working poor to contribute more so they can contribute less,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address.

“Making middle America pay more may be business as usual in Washington, but to the rest of the nation, it must be unjust, unfair and unacceptable.

“I regret that otherwise good and responsible legislators would even consider this proposal, but I will fight it,” he said.

Sens. David L. Boren (D-Okla.) and J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), both of whose states are heavily dependent on the oil industry, have proposed an alternative to Clinton’s budget that would eliminate the energy tax and reduce proposed tax increases on Americans earning more than $150,000.

Their plan would make up for the loss of revenue by cutting Social Security cost-of-living increases, reducing the earned-income tax credit for the working poor and making a series of cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs.

Later, in a speech here at tiny New Hampshire Technical College, Clinton told 176 graduating students: “You have a right to an economic plan that brings this deficit down so that we are not crushed by it into your children’s children’s future.

“The work of change is never easy,” Clinton said.

The President spent part of his address, the first of a series of commencement speeches during the next several weeks, explaining the details of his energy tax.

He said families making less than $30,000 a year would be spared altogether, while those making between $30,000 and $60,000 would pay just $1 more a month next year and up to $17 a month after three years.

Clinton’s radio address marked an escalation of his rhetoric in opposition to the Boren-Johnston plan. “The big oil lobby is trying to wiggle out of its contribution to deficit reduction and force senior citizens barely above the poverty line to get lower Social Security benefits,” he said.

In the Republican response to the President’s radio message, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas called Clinton’s tax plan “a middle-class tax increase that will destroy jobs and spur inflation.”

“His is not the agenda of a ‘new Democrat,’ as we were promised in last year’s campaign. The Clinton plan . . . is the same old tax-and-spend approach we saw in the years of malaise under Jimmy Carter,” Armey said.

Clinton received a mixed response in New Hampshire, a state he carried in November but which is notoriously averse to taxes.

“You’re a liar,” one man shouted at him as he tried to explain the reasons for his tax proposals.

The President also came in for some digs over the recent controversy concerning his haircut. As his motorcade sped to the technical college, it passed a sign in a barber shop window reading: “Mr. President--Our haircuts cost $12.”