Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate reached a deal Wednesday night with a sufficient number of party members who wanted to preserve Medicaid as Congress crafted a budget, allowing for a vote on the budget resolution today. But agreement or not, it is still a budget that, in an era of record-setting deficits, is over-heavy on tax cuts while slashing programs for the poor.

Maine’s senators should vote for it, if the latest count in the Senate is correct.

Given all Congress has learned about the cost of cuts in taxes, of chipping away at programs that provide a safety net for the unemployed and underemployed and of passing other entitlement costs down to states, the agreement is short-sighted and destructive. But it has, reportedly, 50 votes plus the vote of Vice President Cheney to pass without the support of either Maine senator.

If that remains true, the question for the Maine senators is whether they would be more effective as specific bills are negotiated this year if they join with the majority on the resolution or reject the resolution. It isn’t an easy call and voting yes would be very unpopular among a very vocal part of Maine.

When the Bush administration warns of Social Security doom, 2041 is just a few flips of the calendar away. When it worries about the deficit-producing effects of its massive tax cuts (does it worry about those effects?) the problem is publicly belittled. Yet the $106 billion in cuts, $70 billion of which are protected through the resolution, have serious consequences long-term.

Senate moderates have heard Comptroller General David Walker’s messages to Congress for the last several years which have been simple and forceful. Deficit spending, driven by Social Security and health care, will slowly strangle the federal government in the next couple of decades. If the president’s tax cuts are made permanent, balancing the budget by 2040 would mean cutting programs by as much as 60 percent or raising taxes by 2.5 times the current level.

Compare this with the fixation in the Senate with whether Finance Committee entitlements, mostly Medicaid, would be cut $10 billion or $17 billion over the next five years. The answer was a total of $10 billion in budget-cutting instructions to the committee, with an expected $5 billion from Medicaid and $5 billion from, perhaps, Supplemental Security Income, the earned income tax credit, maybe Medicare. The $10 billion is part of a larger overall entitlement cut of $35 billion that will also affect agriculture, including food stamps, pension benefits and student loans.

The budget’s harm doesn’t stop there. It zeros out Amtrak subsidies but maintains drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It has funding for shipbuilding crucial to Maine but cuts important funds to states. It turns what could have been a useful examination of Medicaid, leading to needed reform, into a means for finding cuts.

All of it adds up to disappointment, but complaining about it and doing something about it are two different things. Voting for the budget resolution, with serious misgivings stated loudly to leadership, is the uncomfortable choice but it also offers the better chance to clean up some of the mess in the resolution later.

None of this applies, of course, if the number of yes votes falls below 50 and the option exists to defeat the budget outright.