Digging in on 'debt reduction'
WASHINGTON ONLY IN a country governed by the triumvirate of George Bush, Bill Frist, and Dennis Hastert could the following set of events unfold with absurd smoothness.
The Senate narrowly approves a ''deficit reduction" bill as part of a larger package that will increase the deficit. That was last week.
The House narrowly approves its own Draconian ''deficit reduction" bill as part of a larger package that will increase the deficit. That is likely to be this week, barring a last-minute revolt of moderate congressmen.
The final version of the legislation, negotiated by conservative legislators from each chamber with moderates and Democrats cut out of the behind-closed-doors process, jettisons the sensible portions of the Senate bill and adds the worst of the House measure, presenting members with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition that asks senators to approve via the back door what they had rejected.
President Bush then approves the result, and the country is again another day older and deeper in debt.
This kind of government -- you might call it the institutionalization of irresponsibility -- is what the vast majority of Americans, who tell pollsters by large margins that the country is headed in the wrong direction and that both the president and Congress are not doing their jobs well, reject. But they are getting it anyway.
Supposedly, this latest expression of alleged concern about the ruinous budget deficit stemmed from the shock of fiscal hawks among the Republican membership of the House at the first batch of measures rushed through in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- $62 billion by my arithmetic. That necessity essentially wiped out a one-time corporate taxes windfall and put the federal budget deficit back on its familiar path toward the stratosphere (above $400 billion).
In its deliberations, the Senate attempted to move the needle back on the spending side, coming up with what the Congressional Budget Office estimated would be roughly $35 billion in new savings over the next five years. In order to minimize the impact on ordinary families and the poor, moreover, the Senate targeted one of the more outrageous sections of the horridly complicated prescription drug program under Medicare that was narrowly enacted at the end of 2003. That would be the so-called ''stabilization fund," a $10 billion goody that will be paid out to HMOs and other providers. In English it's a slush fund, and Bush has pleased his private-sector buddies by threatening to veto the entire legislation if this one provision is retained. However, aware that Bush has been making idle threats like this throughout his presidency, the Senate held its ground -- at least through phase one of the process.
Even so, it meekly submitted when Bush insisted that its addition to Medicaid assistance to poverty-stricken victims of the hurricane be slashed to barely 10 percent of the officially estimated need.
The House makes all this look liberal by comparison. With no provision in its own measure to cut the fund for Medicare providers, all its budget cuts focus on working families and the poor. The total is higher -- nearly $55 billion -- but without a Medicare provision, it has included reductions in programs assisting child care and even cuts in food stamps and Medicaid.
Since this remains Tom DeLay's House behind the fig leaf of Dennis Hastert's speakership and Roy Blunt's acting majority leadership, the House is also planning major benefits for the profits-saturated energy business. Included in its revenue-raising items are receipts based on a revival of offshore drilling and on the sale of public lands to private developers.
If all this scrambling and missed direction were actually about reducing the deficit, that would be one thing. But it isn't. Coming right behind these measures that reduce assistance to those who need it is that staple of Bush-era politics and economics -- tax cuts. It may be hard to believe, much less stomach, but the president's budget proposal last winter and Congress's budget resolution this spring made provision for another $70 billion worth of tax cuts. You might think there was no tax that hadn't been cut in the Bush era, but you would be wrong. The Senate's and the House's tax-writing committees have managed to find some -- surprisingly, they are in the area of investment and other high-income pursuits -- and they are being readied for action as soon as the falsely advertised ''deficit reductions" are dispensed with.
To review this ridiculous math, that's more than $60 billion extra for Katrina, minus between $35 billion and $55 billion in program cuts, followed by roughly $70 billion in tax cuts. Such is life under Bush, Hastert, and Frist.
Before the Senate voted last week, there was a final irony. Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota proposed that Congress return to the rules of the '90s that helped produce record surpluses -- strict pay-as-you go budgeting, meaning no spending increases or revenue reductions without compensating cuts in spending or increases in revenue. It needed 60 votes and got 50. The ''conservatives" were against it; the progressives for it -- a reflection of the fundamental political reality in this upside-down age.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. 
