Squandering our substance.

ITEM: Speaking of the new budget approved by Congress, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert commented in a January 2 article entitled "The Machete Budget": "Members of the House and Senate have agreed on legislation that achieves something approaching $40 billion in savings over five years primarily by hammering the sick, the poor, the elderly and college students and their families. This is the same Congress that genuflects each time the president asks for another gift-wrapped tax cut for the wealthiest among us. The textbooks tell us that the U.S. is a representative democracy, but only the upper strata are truly represented."

ITEM: "If nothing else," reported the Christian Science Monitor for December 27, 2005, "Washington's tortured, yearlong budget debate shows that cutting federal spending may be even more difficult today than it used to be.... As defense and entitlement spending has grown, most everything else that the US government does has been squeezed and squeezed again in search of savings. Most of the obvious cuts have now been made."

CORRECTION; Liberals and big spenders often attempt to push their agenda by setting false premises about what Washington should be doing. It also helps if they are allowed to pervert the language describing the basic form of the U.S. government. Such distortions are involved here.

So-called entitlements, for example, are not written in stone by the hand of the Almighty, but were larded into the budget by prodigal lawmakers who would rather not take responsibility for what they have done. One of the latest additions to the "entitlement" package, supposedly a sacred cow beyond the reach of legislators, was put there not long ago by those very congressmen: the new Medicare drug benefit. The federal government now says this attempt to purchase votes of seniors will cost $724 billion over the next decade, which (no surprise) is an 80 percent increase from the estimate at the time of passage.

It's actually going to be much more expensive than that when one takes into ac count the mammoth long-term unfunded liability of the drug benefit (what is promised over what is provided for in revenues). For this prescription drug benefit alone, the unfunded liability is more than eight trillion dollars! David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, points out that this $8.1 trillion "is more than the entire debt of the U.S. outstanding since the beginning of the republic in 1789."