•   News  
• Business
• Entertainment
• Pics
• Blogs
• Sports
• Obits
• Redskins
• Real Estate
• Classifieds
• Jobs
• Search Local
• Shop
• Bride & Groom

Give Damocles his sword back

AMERICA HAS a Republican Congress and a Republican president: The party formerly known as "the bookkeepers" rules. Joblessness stands at 4.6 percent and, leaving aside job quality, that's functionally full employment. Inflation rates are creeping, but still low. The stock market consistently tops a once-unimaginable 11,000 points. Taxes have been cut, and Treasury receipts have mounted, not fallen, plausibly as a result.

All of this normally would guarantee a political lock for the party in power. Why, then, are so many folks riled about the economy--including a good chunk of the GOP rank and file? To paraphrase famed Democratic strategist James Carville, "It's the pork, stupid." All the economic good news in the world can't hide the spending sprees of this 109th Congress, nor what those sprees have wrought: a ballooning national debt that hangs over the nation like the Sword of Damocles.

Some numbers to ponder: $423 billion and $296 billion. The first is the deficit that the administration originally projected for the budget year ending in September; the second, the revised figure announced the other day by President Bush himself. Usually a difference in the right direction of $127 billion justifies celebration, but $296 billion in the hole hardly merits a presidential trumpet. It's a staggering figure--and we haven't yet seen the first wave of baby boomers demanding their Medicare and Social Security allotments.

Mr. Bush heralded the new data thus: "Economic growth fueled by tax relief has sent our tax revenues soaring." He noted the historically impressive 18 straight quarters of economic growth. Well and good--but it all could come to naught because of unrestrained spending. As Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., notes, "In nominal terms, [this deficit] is still one of the four largest in history."

But before we place the noose around the neck of Mr. Bush, who has never vetoed a spending bill and sired the ultra-costly Medicare prescription-drug entitlement, let's reflect that he hardly deserves to swing alone. The president proposes a budget, to be sure, but it must make its way through Congress. And there are few innocents in that labyrinth. Nearly every legislator, of both major parties, loves pork, adding fancy new projects to the budget, keeping alive dubious district or state programs, or blindly throwing money into venerable endeavors that need financial overhaul.