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Budgetary sanity long overdue

Congressional Republicans, who claim to be the party of fiscal sobriety but staggered around reeking of deficit spending for six years, just got their bluff called. Newly empowered House Democrats passed a "pay as you go" rule that would force members to offset any new spending with cuts elsewhere in the budget or tax increases to make up the difference. In households throughout America, that's called living within your means.

Yet to hear the howl from some Republicans, you would have thought mom had taken their credit card away. Not entirely. The new rule doesn't apply to existing entitlement spending, such as for Social Security. And there are some loopholes that even suddenly thrifty Democrats might be looking to exploit.

Still, it's a step in the right direction. With their dissolute spending and extravagant tax cuts mostly for the wealthiest Americans, Republicans have run the national debt to nearly $9-trillion. If that behavior doesn't stop, the nation will end up with "ever-larger deficits resulting in a federal debt burden that ultimately spirals out of control," according to the Government Accountability Office's latest fiscal outlook.

Yet listen to Republicans whine about the rule, called "pay-go" for short. "Well, what pay-go really means is you're going to have a tax increase, and most Republicans are not going to support the pay-go provision," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

In other words, when President Bush tries to extend his tax cuts, they won't pass the pay-as-you-go smell test. It could be a problem for Democrats, too, who promised to fix the increasingly unfair alternative minimum tax, which adds to the tax bill of more and more middle-class Americans. Under pay as you go, however, Democrats would presumably have to eliminate another tax cut of equal value.

The rule could be difficult to live with, acknowledged new House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who would like to repeal the AMT but would have to find $50-billion just to balance the cost for one year. "It's not good for me to have pay-go," he said, "but it's good for the country."

So Congress may have to give up some tax cuts for the rich to provide relief to the middle class and still remain fiscally responsible. What's wrong with that?

[Last modified January 9, 2007, 00:00:40]