Democrats plan breaking deficit discipline promise again

Democrats again ignoring deficit promise, this time to help veterans and the unemployed

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Now they're willing to do it again for a $13 billion extension of unemployment aid and a doubling of education benefits for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. They've already swelled the deficit by $200 billion since December with tax relief for the middle class and rebates for nearly everyone.

In a federal budget exceeding $3 trillion -- and with President Bush requesting almost $200 billion this year for the two wars -- their latest transgressions may seem modest. Democrats say a six-month extension of jobless benefits will stimulate the moribund economy and they characterize the new college aid for veterans as a war-related cost.

But they come on the heels of tossing out their fiscal responsibility rules for a $168 billion economic rescue package of tax rebates for most Americans three months ago and a $50 billion measure two months earlier rescuing some 20 million middle-class taxpayers from an average $2,000 in higher taxes.

Deficit hawks in both parties worry that the stimulus bill opened the door to further deficit-swelling legislation. They view the rule -- dubbed "PAYGO" in inside-the-Beltway slang for pay-as-you-go -- as a key bulwark against Congress' propensity to spend outside its means.

"If they start calling everything 'stimulus' or 'war-related' certainly PAYGO will be very weak," said Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group. "I'm very worried."

Even some of the top supporters of that budget approach are good at overcoming it by finding the required 60-vote majority in the 100-member Senate. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., one of Congress' most ardent advocates of the rule, was a driving force behind a recently-passed proposal for $25 billion over the next three years in tax cuts for homebuilders and other money-losing businesses and $6 billion in tax breaks for renewable energy companies. Neither is in compliance with budget rules.

"The only things that shouldn't be paid for, in my view, are those things that are part of a stimulus package," said Conrad. "You could argue that extension of unemployment is part of a stimulus package."

In the House, the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of 47 fiscally conservative Democrats who have been fighting for the "pay-as-you-go" approach, has persuaded Conrad to promise to be more vigilant in enforcing the rule. It requires 60 votes to waive objections lodged under "pay as you go," rules, but the rule isn't always invoked.

That 60-vote threshold -- the same number required to defeat a filibuster -- is usually difficult to overcome. But in the case of the alternative minimum tax, Senate Republicans have made it clear they would block any AMT fix that is financed by tax increases elsewhere in the budget.

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