The president's birth tax.

Byline: The Register-Guard

There they go again, spending like drunken sailors. Except that's not really fair, because sailors on shore leave sober up after a while. The Bush administration has been in office for five years now, with a Congress mostly under Republican control, and on Monday the White House delivered a federal budget that proposes spending $2.77 trillion, while taking in only $2.42 trillion. The $350 billion difference will be borrowed.

President Bush's budget does make some nods toward fiscal restraint. If adopted as submitted, the proposal would eliminate 141 programs, keep growth in discretionary spending below the rate of inflation, and reduce spending for entitlements, mainly Medicare, by $65 billion over five years.

But the budget won't be approved as submitted. In an election year, Congress will reject budgetary choices that offend any measurable constituency. In past rounds of budgeting, the president has proposed aggregate spending increases averaging 4 percent, Congress has approved increases of 8 percent, and Bush has never used his veto.

Bush's new budget would make federal spending equal to 20.8 percent of the gross domestic product, up from 18.4 percent when President Clinton left office. To be sure, the federal government has acquired large obligations since then - wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, new homeland security programs, hurricane reconstruction costs. But the defense spending related to the Iraq war, given a lowball estimate of $50 billion for the next year, is not included in the budget, and will be the subject of a separate supplemental appropriation.

The deficit for the next five years, not counting supplemental appropriations for the Iraq war or other purposes, is projected to total $2.2 trillion. Part of that borrowed money would replace revenue the president proposes to forgo by making permanent the tax cuts approved in 2003. This revenue amounts to $179 billion over five years, and $1.35 trillion over the next decade.

All of this adds up to a distortion of priorities. It's grotesque that Bush and Congress would subordinate all else - the supposedly conservative goal of a balanced budget, the supposedly liberal desire to prevent further fraying of the social safety net - to preserve tax cuts that are heavily tilted toward the wealthiest Americans.

One consequence of borrow-and-spend government is a rising national debt, now $7.4 trillion. Interest payments on this debt amount to $247 billion in the budget Bush has proposed, or 9 percent of total federal spending. This is one out-of-control entitlement that receives too little attention; bondholders, many of them outside the country, have first claim on federal revenues. Now and in the future, each dollar of interest is a dollar that can't be spent on anything else - domestic programs, national defense or tax cuts.

Borrowing places an obligation of repayment on future generations of Americans. Call it the birth tax. The president couldn't have built his budget without it.