Party on, Congress

Congressional budget resolutions are supposed to be fairly detailed guidelines for the nation’s spending and revenue plans, somewhere between broad outline and a line-by-line departmental account. The budget resolution being considered by this Congress bears more resemblance to the shopping list for a frat house party.

The resolution does not just underestimate what the federal government will spend in the coming fiscal year. It grossly underestimates, and it does so with a purpose – to protect the president’s tax cut under special rules that make the core of the cut immune from Senate tinkering. Built upon a foundation of projected surpluses, this first floor of the president’s 10-year economic plan almost certainly will, once such things as the missile defense system, other defense increases and Social Security privatization get added in, be topped off by deficit spending. That likelihood, when combined with a budget that does not do nearly enough to account for programs like comprehensive health care reform and education programs that match education mandates, is no way to treat tomorrow’s taxpayers.

Particularly when the tax cut, though mercifully reduced from $1.6 trillion to $1.3 trillion, remains so skewed toward the wealthy, as tax cuts that deal solely with income and estate taxes are prone to do. The Senate Finance Committee, stocked with lawmakers from relatively poor states, such as Maine’s Sen. Olympia Snowe, are working on tilting the package to provide more relief toward middle and lower-income Americans through adjustments to tax brackets and reductions in payroll taxes. The bill that comes out of committee will differ substantially from the president’s proposal; the test will be how well it can withstand attempts to change it back on the Senate floor.

The budget resolution now under consideration does not fully explain how the president’s high-dollar initiatives – defense and retirement programs, for example – will be funded after the tax cut takes effect. It has economists and critics again questioning the president’s math. Worse, it asks Americans knowingly and intentionally to delude themselves.

Administration officials say that the new budget plan holds down growth in the federal government significantly and that the costs of new programs will be covered by a contingency fund built into the budget. But the starting-point spending levels are unrealistic, the spending-growth limits are likely to be broken and the promise that Congress will watchdog the budget in a way it never has before is just plain silly.

One look at the way members routinely pack bills with unrelated goodies for the home state or district, and they way they support others in their packing and it is clear it will not take something as dramatic as a major increase in defense spending to bust this budget to smithereens. Somebody – ahem, tomorrow’s taxpayers – is going to have some serious cleaning up to do.