There isn't much to be happy about in new fiscal year

When Wednesday night's third presidential debate is held in Tempe, Ariz., the government of the United States will be two weeks into its new fiscal year. Not that anyone would know it based on the track record of Congress.
Members of the House of Representatives left Washington, D.C., Saturday, and the Senate will begin its pre-election recess today, yet only a few of the 13 spending bills that fund the government for the coming year have been passed.
In a formal acknowledgment that the House and Senate blew yet another annual deadline, they passed a continuing resolution, a stopgap measure that will keep the government running at current levels of funding until Nov. 20. Exactly what will be done after the election is anyone's guess, but Congress will probably end up wrapping a number of pending appropriations bills into one, huge omnibus spending bill -- probably in excess of $300 billion -- and pass that. That is not a responsible approach to budgeting, especially at a time of fiscal crisis.
Of course, the words responsible and budgeting do not often appear in the same sentence with Congress, and for good reason.
Look at how Congress approached the need to repeal a $5 billion annual tax break provided to American exporters that was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization. The European Union had enacted retaliatory tariffs on US. exports that are now at 12 percent and that increase by 1 percent each month.
Rather than simply end the tax break, Congress began putting together a replacement package of tax relief. That effort grew into a $136 billion package of tax breaks for a wide array of special interests that had nothing to do with the tariff issue.
It includes a $10 billion industry-funded buyout of tobacco farmers; a provision that allow earners who don't pay state or local income taxes to deduct on their federal returns what they pay in sales taxes; new tax breaks targeted for construction companies, oil refiners, engineering and architectural firms and movie studios; tax benefits for fishermen, native Alaskan whalers, makers of bows and arrows and small aircraft, farmers who grow product for ethanol and the bio-diesel industry, ranchers and owners of marginal oil and natural-gas wells.
Oh, and there are new benefits for owners of NASCAR racetracks and for slower moving racers, the overseas winnings from U.S. horse and dog racing got tax exemptions.
All of which will be put on the tab, to be paid by our children and grandchildren -- with interest.
It is a disgrace. But it does give President Bush an opportunity to bring some drama to Wednesday night's debate on domestic issues, which is sure to include questions about the budget. He could announce that he will exercise the veto for the first time in his presidency.
That would not only send a message to Congress that even a president who has never met a tax cut he couldn't love has had enough of adding the cost of those cuts to an ever-growing deficit.
But that isn't likely to happen. Nor is it likely that Democratic challenger John Kerry will present a viable method of doing more than cutting the growth of the deficit in half.
Neither candidate, and certainly not the Congress, has shown itself willing to tell the American people that they can't have it all: economic, domestic and international security, social services for every phase of a persons life -- and tax cuts. They won't say it, but it is true.