Rob from the poor and give to rich? It really happens.

As the legend goes, when asked why he robbed banks, Willy Sutton replied "because that's where the money is." President Bush's proposed budget called for eliminating more than a billion dollars from mentoring and college preparation programs for disadvantaged youth, effectively eliminating the Community Oriented Policing Service program, reducing food stamps, and knocking out almost $45 billion in Medicaid funding over the next 10 years.

While Congress has pulled back on some of these proposals, the House Republicans' budget would nonetheless trim job training and unemployment assistance by $346 million, reduce programs to improve rural health care by 41 percent, and almost implement the president's proposal to freeze Head Start funding.

Doing so would take almost 25,000 of our nation's poorest toddlers out of pre-school, according to the National Head Start Association.

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, has called the direction of negotiations over the final status of the bill "scandalous and unconscionable."

In a reconciliation bill, which allows legislators to make tax and entitlement changes with only a majority vote in both Houses of Congress, the Republican leadership has proposed denying food stamps to almost 300,000 people, cutting child-support enforcement funding by $5 billion, and saving $12 billion from Medicaid over the next five years, in part by denying services to or imposing new costs on 6 million uninsured children.

Even with such cuts, the reconciliation package will increase the deficit, partly to pay for extending dividend tax cuts and capital gains cuts. Those cuts deliver almost 80 percent of their benefits to workers earning more than all but 3 percent of the population.

You may think that even though this doesn't sound like a "compassionate conservative" budget, bleeding hearts like me have to realize that this is the money we have to cut to control the deficit. But is that so?

Domestic discretionary spending--excluding all defense, homeland security, and international spending--will account for just 3.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2005. That's just slightly higher than when Bush took office. And growth in Medicaid spending has made only a minuscule contribution to recent widening in the deficit.

It's deteriorating revenues that are behind long-term budget deficits. Bush's refusal to pay for even a portion of the tax cuts passed under his watch played a big role in this. As new tax exemptions and the estate-tax repeal start to kick in, the amount going to the top 1 percent of earners will rise to more than $100 billion annually.

Refusing to ask the wealthiest Americans to sacrifice part or all of the tax cuts they have received since 2001 does more than direct hundreds of billions dollars away from deficit reduction, Social Security or other vital programs. At a more fundamental level, it undermines the president's moral authority to ask for sacrifice from typical Americans to re-establish fiscal discipline or assure Social Security or Medicare solvency.

Finally, some Republicans are starting to speak out.

"Contrary to what some of my colleagues seem to believe, tax cuts do not pay for themselves," said Ohio Sen. George Voinovich.

Led by Rep. Michael Castle of Delaware, moderate Republicans are balking at such tradeoffs. In the Senate, Olympia Snowe of Maine objected on grounds that it looks like the Senate would be cutting benefits to the poor to pay for a capital gains tax cuts for the most affluent.

What Snow is talking about is Willie Sutton in reverse, and it's neither smart nor fight.

Gene Sperling is author of the recently released book, "The Pro-Growth Progressive."