With the November election looming, the congressional session waning and the legislative accomplishments all but missing, House Republican leadership hunkered down for a few days last week to plot a strategy that will define the GOP and set its candidates apart from Democratic opponents.

Smaller government, lower taxes and less bureaucracy is how Speaker Newt Gingrich spun it. Bigger favors, greater posturing and more fiscal shortsightedness would be the alternate take.

Start with IRS reform. Once upon a time, the idea was to rein in renegade agents, to stop terrorizing taxpayers, to replace the jackboots and cudgels with friendly smiles and helping hands. By the time the majority party got through with what would have been useful lawmaking, simple reform turned into a package of narrowly targeted tax breaks that will cost as much as $13 billion during the next 10 years. So much for the vaunted “pay as you go” provision of the balanced budget act.

Now, the Congressional Budget Office announces what nearly everyone had long suspected — the federal budget surplus will be some $63 billion higher this year than originally projected, $520 billion higher in the next five years and as much as $1.6 trillion higher in the next decade.

Given that every cent of that surplus comes from the Social Security trust fund (actually more, since without raiding the nation’s retirement account, the federal budget otherwise still is in substantial deficit) and that Social Security and Medicare are on a collision course with aging Baby Boomers, the prudent thing to do would be to sock away this surplus that really isn’t a surplus at all until the fundamental flaws in the nation’s two biggest entitlement programs are fixed. Socking away looks even better when the uncertainties of the Asian financial crisis and the still unknown costs of the Year 2000 computer glitch are factored in.

Instead, Speaker Gingrich announces a massive tax cut proposal. “Significant tax relief for hard-working Americans,” he calls it. Provided those hard-working Americans have Individual Retirement Accounts, assets subject to capital-gains taxes, substantial estates to pass along to heirs and second homes in need of mortgage interest deductions. Americans without those things apparently just aren’t working hard enough.

Doling out a tax cut to the IRA, capital-gains crowd of today with money obligated to the working class retirements of tomorrow may be good campaign strategy, but it is unwise and dishonest. An also unwise but at least honest approach would be simply to cut payroll taxes. Young Joe or Mary Lunchpail may still come away empty-handed when they retire (one proposal to fix Social Security would make that at age 70), but for now they would have the pleasure of seeing that FICA withholding line on their pay stub decrease.

Workers just entering the workforce are in line for a shafting of historic proportions. It may well be asking for too much to expect Republicans to look decades into the future, but asking them to look past Nov. 3 isn’t at all unreasonable.