Congress cuts taxes, spends as if there is no tomorrow

Congress continues to live life according to the fiction that deficits don't matter.
Perhaps they don't to congressmen who have the ability to increase their own pay, who have gold-plated health care plans and extraordinary pensions. Congressmen don't have to worry about whether Medicare and Social Security will survive 20 or 30 years from now.
But deficits do matter for the vast majority of the 293 million Americans who aren't members of the House or Senate. Those Americans have to worry about what will begin to happen when the first baby boomers become eligible for Social Security in 2008. They have to worry about how the government is going to manage a debt that already stands at more than $7 trillion (about $24,000 for every one of those Americans) and continue to meet its obligations to Social Security, Medicare, defense, Medicaid, education, the infrastructure, medical and scientific research and everything else the federal government must or should do.
But instead of worrying about the future, Congress continues to worry in the present only about how many more tax cuts it can make for how many more special interests. And each of those tax cuts adds billions -- sometimes tens or hundreds of billions -- to the aforementioned deficit.
A simple idea
Most recently, Congress was faced with a simple proposition: Repeal an export subsidy for U.S. firms that the World Trade Organization had ruled illegal. Until Congress acted, the WTO would enforce an escalating series of tariffs against U.S. goods.
Congress was willing to repeal the subsidies only if it could give the corporations who would be losing the subsidies tax relief to compensate them for their losses.
Then congressional leadership decided to build support for the bill by adding more and more tax breaks until, in the words of the budget watchdog, Taxpayers for Common Sense, we now have a "platinum-plated pig" on our hands.
Included in the corporate tax bill are breaks for the makers of fish finders; bows and arrows; tackle boxes and Puerto Rican rum -- along with Alaskan whalers, bank directors, dog-track owners and ethanol producers.
The Senate and House have passed wildly varying versions of the bill. The House version includes a costly provision that by rights should be in a farm bill, a $10 billion buyout of tobacco farmers. The Senate bill has $19 billion in tax breaks for the energy industry that properly should be taken up in an energy bill.
Both bills are a mixture of tax cuts, increases and loophole closers. With those offsets, the House bill, which passed last week, would cost the treasury $34 billion over 10 years. The Senate bill, which passed last month, would result in a net gain of $3 billion.
Undue optimism
But these estimates are based on the optimistic assumption that when these tax breaks begin expiring over the decade, Congress won't renew them. If they were renewed, the cost of the House bill would skyrocket to $190 billion.
All of which will be passed on to our children and grandchildren. All of which will make it that much more difficult for future Congresses to balance their budgets and meet their obligations to American citizens, especially those average Americans who will depend on Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid to provide them with a basic standard of living.
The House and Senate should scrap these legislative monstrosities and repeal the export subsidies that were found to be illegal. But in an election year, when all those special interests have already begun counting the money they're going to put into their pockets, after passing along a small cut to those congressmen who made it possible, that's not going to happen.