Many including myself have pointed out that the Congress is being inconsistent, not to say mush-brained, when they tout a spending cut of $40 billion as "fiscal discipline" that is passed alongside tax cuts of $90 billion and counting.  Although salient to the political debate, this glosses over some crucial points.

In principle a deficit could be associated with a decrease in the burden of government, and a surplus with the opposite.  Huh?

The important distinction is the burden on taxpayers as a whole, and the differential burdens on generations of taxpayers.  A spending increase (to be defined in a second) whether financed by taxes or debt is paid for sooner or later.  So ANY spending increase is an increase in the burden on taxpayers in general.  If the spending is financed by borrowing, that debt must be serviced.  The present value of the new debt equals interest paid on that debt in the future plus any liquidation of principal.

Now from a liberal standpoint a spending increase can certainly leave taxpayers better off insofar as the value of what the spending provides exceeds the value of foregone taxes, paid now or later.

By this metric there can be no doubt that the Bush Administration has massively increased the burden on taxpayers with its spending increases.  In this sense, the fabled Bush tax cuts are a myth.  There have been no tax cuts.  There has been a tax shift.

What's a spending increase?  That can be a little murky.  It's spending that would not have otherwise taken place.  In the case of entitlements, this is relatively clear.  When you change the rules of Social Security or Medicaid you change future spending.  More is an increase, less is not.  Left to itself, of course, such programs will increase in dollar terms under current policy.  It's the increase above that baseline that qualifies as a discretionary increase in spending.

Part of the budget is programs whose amounts are decided annually.  Here the determination of an increase is less clear.  The need for a program could grow (as for Medicare), but if the inflation-adjusted spending for that program is the same, it is not described as a spending cut (as it would be for Medicare).

Of course, Bush has jumped up spending by any definition in both categories, to the dismay of small-government partisans.

The extent to which spending is financed with taxes determines the deficit, but it does not increase or decrease the burden on taxpayers.  What it does do is determine the burden on specific generations of taxpayers.  From this standpoint, the Bush deficits push the burden of Bush spending growth to future taxpayers.

So if Congress ends up passing a $40 billion spending cut, they marginally reduce the increased burden on taxpayers in general since 2000.  This is more than wiped out by spending on a war of choice, but put that aside for the sake of argument.

By enacting an even larger tax cut, the Congress does not change the total spending that must be paid for eventually, but it does change the identities of the taxpayers who eventually fork over.  The tax cut concentrates the benefits of the spending cut in the present, relative to the future.

In short, deficits are a redistributionist trip, reverse Robin-Hood under present circumstances.  The fact that little of the spending is for new public investment that could provide some compensation to future taxpayers compounds the perverse impact.  Offsetting this pattern is the extent to which future generations, including wage-earners, will be richer and able to shoulder a greater burden.

The evolution of the tax code from an income tax to a wage tax overlays a class dimension.  Because future taxes will be paid increasingly out of wage and salary, and less out of investment income, the 'future shock' is concentrated on working people.