Perot Rips Deficit Plan, Ducks Questions About His Own : Budget: He calls for defeat of Clinton’s proposals. But the Texas billionaire is evasive about details of his blueprint for balancing the books.

WASHINGTON —  Billionaire businessman Ross Perot attacked President Clinton’s deficit-cutting plan as inadequate Sunday but ducked questions about his own plan being $425 billion short of its balanced-budget goal.

Facing unusually tough grilling on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” Perot blamed new government deficit estimates for the fact that his five-year plan fails to eliminate red-ink spending the way he claimed it would in his independent presidential campaign last year and in a book published last spring.

“Washington doesn’t keep books. The (government) numbers don’t mean anything,” Perot said. But he insisted that his plan was accurate at the time it was unveiled, adding: “We could change the plan and make it work.”

Perot repeatedly declined to say how he would achieve his proposal for a five-year total of $141 billion in cuts in Medicare and Medicaid cuts, claiming that he did not bring details of his plan with him but would supply them later.

“I don’t have the list with me,” Perot said, using the response he has given on several other occasions when pressed for details. “I cannot quote it out of my head. . . . I have it all written down. If you had asked me to bring it, I would have been glad to.”

David Broder of the Washington Post, Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal and Tim Russert of NBC News questioned Perot.

The Texan has scheduled appearances on many TV and radio talk shows to urge defeat of the budget bill so that a bipartisan group of lawmakers can meet with Clinton to come up with deeper, though unspecified, spending cuts.

When the NBC panel pushed Perot for specifics, he angrily implied that they were following directions from White House officials who wanted to distract attention from Clinton’s economic program by focusing on Perot’s.

Russert, moderator of the program, chided his guest by saying: “When the Clinton program was introduced, you said the devil is in the detail. . . . You can’t throw numbers out there and not back them up.”

Immediately after Perot’s appearance, he was criticized by Vice President Al Gore and Bill Bennett, a Republican Party activist, for refusing to give details.

Gore said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” that the exchanges with Perot on NBC were “pretty extraordinary because it demonstrated . . . that the alternatives contain no specifics, they contain no real reductions in the deficit.”

Bennett, who is reportedly considering a presidential run in 1996, charged on the CBS program that Perot is “full of a lot of hot air,” just as the President’s budget is.

“I think he (Perot) came apart this morning,” Bennett said. “This guy is peddling from an empty wagon--there’s nothing but these sort of sagebrush aphorisms.”

Perot stuck by his proposal for a 50-cent-a-gallon increase in federal gasoline taxes over five years, although a Senate-House budget compromise recently limited the increase to 4.3 cents a gallon because a higher figure would fail to get through the Senate.

“Take me to the state where they’re most sensitive to the gasoline tax,” Perot said. “Give me 15 minutes with the guy who hates it the most. Let me say how gasoline is taxed around the world and what a bargain we have here and what an impact this would have on being able to balance the budget. And they’ll say: ‘Oh, OK, Ross. It’s a dirty job and we’ll do our share. But we want these boys in Washington to stop wasting our money and to balance that budget and to keep their promises.’ ”

Perot also reiterated his support for denying Social Security and Medicare benefits to affluent Americans, but he did not mention at what income level the cutoff should occur.

“I don’t care how much support it has in Congress,” he said. “I do care how much support it has with the American people. It would be overwhelmingly positive because there we’re not talking to guys who are lobbyists, we’re talking to the people in the country.”

When the reporters continued to challenge him to discuss details of his plan for deficit reduction, Perot visibly bristled and accused them of making “sneak attacks” by not alerting him in advance to their questions.

“We’re wasting time here trying to go through the details of the plan I outlined,” Perot said. “ . . . The question is, how do you make this (Clinton) plan work for the benefit of the American people?”

Rejecting predictions that financial markets would have a negative reaction if Congress left Washington without acting on the bill, Perot said: “We will not fall apart if we don’t pass this (Clinton) plan on schedule.”