Having been told that the surplus identified by the House Ways and Means Committee last week was not $864 billion but, more likely, a tiny percentage of that, members of Congress did the only sensible thing yesterday and proposed a tax cut for $792 billion.

Though details of the latest proposal are still oozing into form, the previous plan would drop personal income tax rates by 10 percent in four steps over a 10-year period, reduce the top rate on capital gains from 20 to 15 percent, eliminate the tax on inheritance, as well as a host of other tax reductions. Proponents of the bill point to the anticipated federal budget surplus, which the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated to be in the neighborhood of $2.9 trillion over the next decade. Nearly $1.9 trillion of that surplus is expected to come from excess payroll tax revenue, and the two parties have already agreed that money will go directly to the Social Security system and to reducing the national debt.

That leaves $1 trillion, and both parties are breathlessly racing to tell you, the voter, how they will allocate it. The Republicans want to give it back to the taxpayers, because that’s where it belongs, and the Democrats want to divide it between tax cuts, Medicare, education and health care, because they have compassion for the less fortunate.

One problem: the $1 trillion surplus estimate was built on a number of assumptions contained in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, when members of Congress and the president promised to make massive spending cuts in all domestic appropriations, about 20 percent across the board.

They have already spent beyond that in areas like the military and highway construction. The Congressional Budget Office also assumed that all of the surplus, every year of the decade, would be applied to the national debt, which would reduce the yearly interest payments. Without the $864 billion in tax revenue applied to the debt, interest costs would increase $154 billion over the decade. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank, forecasts a surplus of $127 billion over the coming decade, without any tax cut.

There is no trillion-dollar surplus, and Washington knows it. Both parties merely are doing what they normally do — staking out political territory for the upcoming elections. Democrats never miss a chance to try to make Republicans look heartless, and Republicans ignore their pledge to balance the budget if it gets in the way of a vote-winning tax cut.

Certainly anyone who lived through the Reagan years remembers that tax cuts without spending cuts increases the national debt. This may not be the time for a massive tax cut anyway, as some economists believe that such an infusion into the nation’s spending would overstimulate the economy, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates.

Besides, it would be nice to have to actually have a surplus before Congress starts to spend it.