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Deficit sidesplitter

It goes like this: On Wednesday, the House passes $39-billion in budget cuts. On Thursday, the Senate passes $70-billion in tax cuts. Get it?

Want to hear the latest joke going around Washington? Deficit reduction.

In his State of the Union speech, President Bush called on Congress to join him in spending cuts to reduce the deficit by half in three years. The next day the House finalized budget cuts of $39-billion over the next five years, with Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., boasting that it was "a step toward restoring public confidence in the fiscal integrity of (Congress)."

And that is the joke's punch line, though it isn't very funny. Fiscal integrity? More appropriate descriptions of what Congress did would include the words "futility" and "cruelty."

On Friday, the Senate approved $70-billion in tax cuts, more than wiping out the savings. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, even said one of the few tax increases - on oil company profits - would be "dropped" or "scaled back" because "it runs into a lot of opposition." Exxon, with a record $36-billion in profit last year, will be pleased to hear that.

Where there isn't opposition, apparently, is in spending reductions that hurt vulnerable Americans. The House's cuts come on the backs of students (nearly $12-billion) by making it more expensive to get a student loan, and the poor on Medicaid ($4.8-billion) by charging more for prescription drugs and medical care.

Neither President Bush nor Congress has the guts to impose real fiscal responsibility. To make any headway on the deficit, lawmakers would have to stop flogging the poor and go after the real money. From every dollar the federal government spends, 84 cents goes for interest on the federal debt, military defense and homeland security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Bush made a big deal of reining in Social Security and Medicare expenses last year, but the only action he took - creating a Medicare prescription drug benefit - increased the program's cost by $30-billion this year. The Medicare budget alone nearly equals all domestic discretionary spending. But Medicare and Social Security constituents aren't as easy to push around as the poor.

So if deficit reduction isn't a big enough joke, did you hear the one about reducing our addiction to foreign oil?

[Last modified February 6, 2006, 01:09:14]