It's budget math 'for dummies'

Suppose you make $22,000. Then suppose you spend $25,000. That means you are borrowing $3,000 to pay for the extra goodies you and your family can't really afford.

OK. That might work. Once. To pay for, say, a trip to Hawaii.

But the next year, you would have to work even harder to pay your normal expenses, plus pay back the debt and interest on your earlier extravagance.

Or you could do like the federal government does, and decide to take another trip to Hawaii.

Can't afford it? Don't worry. Just borrow what you need and pay it back when you can.

That's what the federal government and Congress have been doing for most of the past half century, and they've gotten away with it, so maybe you will, too.

That's right. In all but five of the last 45 years, Congress has spent more money than it has on hand. No big problem unless you dare to look in the well where the red ink is stored. That well is called the national debt, and today it is filled to the tune of $7.6 trillion.

That's how much we owe.

It's the equivalent of the fellow who makes $22,000 a year having a credit card debt of about $66,000 - and if that doesn't scare you, then we expect to see you in bankruptcy court soon.

To his credit, President Bush is talking about the budget deficit, but the $2.5 trillion budget plan he has submitted would barely make a dent in the $400 billion annual deficit, and only if he got everything he wanted.

But the president isn't going to get what he wants. Politically, it is impossible. You've heard some of the proposals in the president's budget - eliminating funding for Amtrak rail service, phasing out rural health grants, and cutting law enforcement grants to states from $2.8 billion to $1.5 billion. In all, the president proposes reduced spending at 12 out of 23 government agencies including cuts of 9.6 percent in the Department of Agriculture and 5.6 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.

It's possible the president could convince the American people that it's time for fiscal responsibility. It's even possible that many of the programs he is targeting are ripe for the ax. But he's gone about the matter the wrong way.

About one-third of the programs targeted for major cuts are in the education arena, for instance, while at the same time spending on foreign aid is being increased by 10 percent. Forget about the power of the education lobbies; just consider how parents are going to feel about losing programs that directly affect their families while seeing aid to Egypt and Kazakhstan being increased.

They are going to wail. So are Amtrak riders, and power customers in the Northwest (where the president's proposed changes in the Bonneville Power Administration could result in sharply higher prices), and anyone else whose ox got gored.

Indeed, by using the budget deficit as an excuse to eliminate programs for political purposes, the president has almost guaranteed that Congress will play the usual "you scratch my back" games until bit by bit all the fat is back.

Perhaps, now that he has got our attention, a better proposal to sell to the American public is zero-based budgeting. Let's have all government programs justify their expenses and demonstrate their benefits each year, and then fund them based on the priorities of the American people. And when we run out of money, let's think about not borrowing a few hundred billion dollars to tide us over for one more year.

One more year of deficit is one more year we can't afford.