Upending the Tax-and-Spend Story

As we cheerfully write the checks and stuff the envelopes at tax-deadline time, David Broder in the Washington Post has some news for us: Those terrible tax-and-spend Democrats are working to get the government back to pay-as-you-go prudence after six years of Republican drunken-sailor binging:

“Instead of promising more unaffordable tax cuts that go mainly to the richest Americans, as their Republican counterparts have done for the past six years, key Democrats are imposing some real spending discipline on themselves.

“That is the underreported story in the budget resolutions passed by the House and Senate just before the Easter recess and now headed for tweaking in a conference between the chambers and final approval in the next few weeks...

“By itself, it does not deal with the long-term and massive problems of financing Social Security and Medicare benefits for the retiring baby boom generation. But it can be, if enforced, an effective way of preventing the budget deficit from getting worse.”

It’s becoming clear that, along with the high-profile investigations of Bush wrongdoing, voters are getting good returns on their November 2006 investment in Democratic control of Congress, even though the big one--stopping the war in Iraq--is still fluctuating in the market.