From the Wall Street Journal:

What with the big stories of Iraq and the Presidential horse race, and the non-story of the U.S. attorneys, the Beltway press corps seems all tapped out. That does leave the small matter of economic policy, however, and the big but uncovered news that Congress has just lit a fuse for the biggest tax increase in history.

The new House and Senate majorities have now passed budget resolutions—five-year budget outlines—that include the repeal of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Republicans are overstating things when they imply this means a tax increase this year. The Bush tax cuts don’t expire until the end of 2010, and Democrats aren’t about to tip their tax hand before the 2008 election. But under the cover of zero media attention, Democrats are constructing a budget process that will make a tax increase all but inevitable.

The ploy here is “pay-as-you-go” budget rules that Democrats are implementing in the name of “restoring fiscal responsibility.” A few journalists even quote that phrase with a straight face. But everyone in Washington knows that “paygo” is all about making tax cuts more difficult, and not about slowing the growth of spending.

Under “paygo,” extending the Bush tax cuts is itself a tax cut that must be offset either with cuts in entitlement spending or with other tax increases. And paygo merely constrains the growth of “new” entitlements. Entitlement rules already in place don’t count under paygo rules, so Medicare, Medicaid and the new “children’s” health-care program (SCHIP) will keep growing on autopilot. So-called discretionary spending—defense, education, highways, etc.—isn’t affected at all.

This is a big enough political con.

I’ve been making these same points about the Dems’ paygo scheme for some time now.  How any of those unserious buffoons on the left can tell us, with a straight face, that paygo has anything to do with fiscal responsibility is beyond me.  Paygo has nothing to do with curing our government’s budget woes and everything to do with making it harder for our government to give us our money back.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that when you have a budget problem the first thing you do is stop spending money.  Yet for some reason the Dems aren’t interested in doing that.  Instead, they just want to keep raising our taxes as government spending increases year after year after year.