The politics of profligacy.

ITEM: An Associated Press article in USA Today, entitled "Federal Deficit Now Lowest in 4 Years," reported on October 11: "The federal deficit fell to a four-year low in the budget year that just ended, a result President Bush pointed to Wednesday in claiming Republicans are better stewards of the economy than are Democrats."

Earlier in the day the administration had released budget numbers showing that the deficit was $248 billion for the fiscal year ending September 30, which was well below the $423 billion deficit the administration had forecast in the budget it submitted to Congress in February.

CORRECTION: Neither Democrats nor Republicans have much to be proud of when it comes to proper stewardship of the taxpayers' money. While it is obviously better to have a somewhat smaller deficit than expected, the bar has been set mighty low to call this a brilliant success.

The deficit over the last year was not quite as large because spending rose 7 percent while tax revenues jumped 12 percent. It should not be a point of honor to have taken that much more from the taxpayers.

For the last fiscal year, the federal budget blew up to an astounding $2.7 trillion. This was, as pointed out in a Wall Street Journal editorial on October 6, "a 9% increase, or triple the inflation rate. Over the past six years, the federal budget has increased by 49.2%. The main cause of the deficit decline--90% of it, says White House budget director Rob Portman--is a tidal wave of tax revenue. Tax collections have increased by $521 billion in the last two fiscal years, the largest two-year revenue increase--even after adjusting for inflation--in American history."

Piling on all of these taxes is not about to make the economy healthy. Moreover, the price tags on the so-called entitlement programs are actually rising even faster than the government's capability to pay for them. In addition, when you have deficits you have debt payments, and that burden on the economy is skyrocketing--totaling $406 billion in fiscal 2006. The Wall Street Journal on October 12 quotes Brian Bethune, U.S. economist at the consulting firm Globe Insight, as follows: "Spending is rising faster than the growth rate of the economy."

For all the credit (or blame) often given to Republicans as champions of "business," the GOP-led Congress and White House have extracted a huge amount of tax blood via corporate income taxation. Tax collections from corporations jumped 27 percent last year (to $254 billion) and are up by more than 70 percent over a two-year period.

And an increase in individual income taxes last year, up to about $1 trillion, represents the largest proportion of the overall jump in tax revenues; such taxes were up 13 percent over the previous year. Should this really be something about which to gloat? Lest one think the taxes represent just more "soaking of the rich," think again. There just aren't enough "rich" people to fund all this big government. The progressive income tax--one of the tenets of Marxism--cuts deeply into the middle class in order to redistribute the wealth.

According to the Joint Economic Committee, the top half of American taxpayers is paying the highest tax share in decades--a total of 96.7 percent of the individual income taxes in 2004 (the last year for which such figures are available). The top one percent of income-tax filers shelled out 36.89 percent of income taxes; the top 10 percent was hit for 68.19 percent; the top quarter paid 84.9 percent. How wealthy are the alleged plutocrats in the top quarter? You qualify for this level with adjusted gross incomes of $60,041, according to IRS figures.

Defense spending has been on the increase, but it is not the main villain in this piece. Between 2001 and 2006, federal spending outlays in nominal terms jumped by $820 billion, according to Daniel Mitchell and Michelle Muccio of the Heritage Foundation. Of this, 71 percent was unrelated to defense. "The largest domestic spending increases have occurred in education spending (up 137 percent), international spending (up 111 percent), and health research and regulation outlays (up 78 percent)."

Yes, the economy of the United States is growing. But government over the last several years has been absorbing an even larger share of the economy, rising to almost 21 percent of Gross Domestic Product, the highest share in a decade.

Expenditures have become truly breathtaking. Even disregarding those expenditures on defense and homeland security, as noted by the Cato Institute a year ago, President Bush is the biggest spending chief executive in the last three decades. "Indeed, spending as a percentage of GDP has grown more under George W. Bush than it has under any other president since Franklin D. Roosevelt," write Mitchell and Muccio.

The Republican legislators have largely given the White House a free pass for spending, though that doesn't mean it's been free for the taxpayers. Far from it. "Probably the most striking contrast between the Bush era and the last six years of the Clinton administration is this: Congress cut Bill Clinton's non-defense requests by an average of $9 billion each year," comments Peter Grossman in the Indianapolis Star. "But Congress has added an average of $16 billion to Bush's requests. The president has never vetoed these Republican spending binges."

Needless to say, this does not mean that Democrats should be praised for frugality. For example, consider the new hero of the Democrats, Ned Lamont, who has been running for the Connecticut Senate while terming himself a "fiscal conservative." Not by a long shot. He has bragged that he wants to spend more for "clean energy and energy independence," a "serious, long-range infrastructure plan to upgrade our schools, public transportation, highways, our sewage treatment and our levees in below sea-level areas [and] a transportation strategy which interconnects cities and suburbs, inner cities and jobs and affordable housing, and ports and airports."

We already have too many of those kinds of "fiscal conservatives." Rather, we need less boasting, less spending, and more constitutional government.