Restore 'pay as you go'

San Jose Mercury News: While the White House and the Republican leadership in Congress plunge ahead with tax cuts, four Republican senators have remembered that not long ago their party was the one leading the call for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
The four -- John McCain of Arizona, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island -- want to revive a budget practice called "pay as you go." It expired in 2002. Though not always observed, it played a role in turning the budget from deficit to surplus in the late 1990s.
The rule would require that future tax cuts be offset with spending decreases or tax increases elsewhere, so the tax cuts do not add to the budget deficit. Applied to spending increases, it demands that they have a source of funding.
With the deficit estimated at $480 billion this year, offsetting any additional revenue loss is not only prudent, it's crucial.
Republican leaders will have none of this. On tax cuts, they cry: Damn the deficits, full speed ahead.
Their lame concession to pay-as-you-go is to put it in place for one year, but exempt $28 billion in tax cuts, so that three popular cuts can continue: the $1,000 child-care credit; the marriage-penalty elimination; and expansion of the bottom 10 percent tax bracket. All are set to expire at the end of this year.
Deficits
With 47 Democratic senators, the four Republicans are blocking passage of a budget resolution. Good for them, even though President Bush and the Republican leadership will keep pretending that tax cuts don't increase the deficit or that deficits don't matter.
The tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 were designed as temporary measures to disguise their long-term costs. Now, even though the deficit has worsened, Bush and his acolytes would like to make them permanent. Imposing pay-as-you-go would spoil the illusion that further tax cuts would have no costs.
Actually, the White House isn't quite as reckless as it may seem. It has told federal agencies to be prepared for cuts to such programs as the environment, veterans' health care and the National Institutes of Health, starting in the budget year that begins Oct. 1, 2005.