Senate rejects pay-as-you-go

The U.S. Senate came within one vote of restoring some degree of fiscal sanity to the budget process.
One of Ohio's U.S. senators, George Voinovich, joined a handful of Republicans in attempting to pass a pay-as-you-go amendment to the budget. If only he had been joined by Ohio's other senator, Mike DeWine, or any of a number of others who like to portray themselves as fiscal conservatives, the amendment would have passed.
It failed on a 50-50 vote.
Fifty U.S. senators will be able to hold their heads high when their grandchildren ask them what they did in the battle to stunt the growth of deficits that will be shouldered by generations of taxpayers to come. The other 50 can make up whatever lame excuse they choose.
Nothing complicated
Pay-as-you-go was hardly a radical concept. It simply said that any tax cuts or new spending programs would have to be offset with savings in other areas. Its defeat means that about $80 billion in tax cuts that were due to expire, will survive. That will effectively add another $80 billion to the administration's projected deficit, since whenever President Bush has predicted that he will reduce the budget deficits over the next five years, he pretended that those tax cuts would expire. He did so even while maintaining that it was important to make the cuts permanent.
The pay-as-you-go amendment could have just as easily have been called the honesty-in-budgeting amendment. But Congress has so clearly divorced itself from the need to show fiscal restraint and has become so shamelessly casual about passing on its debts to the taxpayers of tomorrow, that a name would not have mattered.
If today's Republicans cannot find the discipline to keep an annual deficit from approaching (or exceeding) a half-trillion dollars, what would they have done if yesterday's Republicans had been successful in passing a balanced budget amendment?