Asked whether he was worried about deficits, Norquist said, "Deficits are driven by how much money the government spends. If you're worried about the deficits, cut spending. People who say they're worried about deficits are actually just against cutting taxes."

The main refrain of conservatives when it comes to deficits is something like a pro-gun rant: Tax cuts don't cause deficits, people do. If you're concerned about deficits, reduce spending, and you'll be fine.

There are a few problems with this formulation. First, it's not easy to cut spending, mostly because, despite what you hear on TV, there really is no evidence that the federal government is a profligate spender. The Congressional Budget Office provides a nice picture (as these things go, at least) of past and likely future federal spending in its report "A 125-Year Picture of the Federal Government's Share of the Economy, 1950 to 2075." One of the charts in the report shows various types of federal spending represented as a percentage of total economic output in the years spanning 1962 to 2001.

During those years, "nondefense discretionary" spending -- which does not include federal spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid but does include spending on all of the programs Republicans love to pillory as a waste of taxpayer money, such as Head Start -- remains more or less constant. In 1962, nondefense discretionary spending is 3.4 percent of the GDP. And, lo, in 2001, it's also 3.4 percent of the GDP. There are a few years when federal spending rises much higher than that -- in 1975, it hit 4.5 percent, and in 1980 it reached 5.2 percent. Mostly, though, spending doesn't seem out of control; it's not, at the very least, ballooning into unmanageability.

According to the CBPP, Bush's new tax-cut plan will reduce federal revenues to as low as 16.4 percent of the GDP in 2003 -- the lowest level since 1959, and about 1.5 percentage points lower than what was collected last year. In order to cut current discretionary spending to meet the new tax cut, then, outlays would have to be reduced from 3.4 percent of the economy to only 1.9 percent. This would represent more than a 40 percent cut in all federal discretionary spending -- obviously impossible in a time of monthly orange alerts.

There's no sign that Congress or the White House is willing to cut spending so drastically. Again, the Reagan years are instructive on this matter. Reagan's tax cuts reduced federal revenues from 19.6 percent of the GDP in 1981, to 17.4 percent in 1984, the lowest point during his presidency. From 1984 to 1988 revenues increased slightly -- to 18.1 percent of the economy in Reagan's last year.

Did this reduction in revenues cause lawmakers to reduce spending? Not a bit; spending shot up in the Reagan administration. Some of this was due to increased discretionary spending, and some due to a nudge up in spending for mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare. But the real budget buster, especially during Reagan's later years and for most of the first Bush administration, was the interest on the federal debt. In 1991, for example, the interest on the debt constituted 3.2 percent of the economy -- about as big a share as is now spent on national defense. In 1983, the federal government spent an amount equal to 23.5 percent of the GDP, the zenith in government spending of the last 40 years.

The Clinton years, by comparison, are a veritable model of discipline. In 2000, the federal government spent money equal to 20 percent of the GDP; this was the lowest level of government spending since the Johnson administration. Republicans note that Clinton was helped out greatly by peace, which reduced the need to spend on defense. That's true. But Clinton also benefited from a steady reduction in interest payments on the debt, which Clinton (and Gore, and George W. Bush) had pledged to pay off by the end of this decade (that goal is now off the table).

It's also interesting to note that since Bush took office, discretionary spending (defense and nondefense) has slowly edged up as a share of the economy. In 2002, discretionary spending was 7.1 percent of GDP; it was 6.3 percent in 2000.

Reagan's deficits were bad, but there was one silver lining to them -- the country had a few decades to go before things really turned sour. We don't have that grace period anymore. In 2008, the people born in 1946, the first year of the baby boom generation, will turn 62 and begin collecting retirement benefits. This will mark the onslaught of a demographic shift that promises to have profound implications for the nation: Entitlement obligations will shoot through the roof while, at the same time -- because fewer people will be working and because of the recent tax cuts -- the federal government will have much less money streaming into its coffers. According to modest measures, Social Security and Medicare will accumulate $25 trillion in debt over the next 75 years, but some analysis has it much higher than that, and if you look beyond the 75-year window the number can double or triple.

The Congressional Budget Office has this crisis all mapped out on its Web site in a series of briefs that go by nervous-sounding titles like "The Looming Budgetary Impact of Society's Aging" and "Social Security and the Federal Budget: The Necessity of Maintaining a Comprehensive Long-Range Perspective." The CBO probably feels it needs to keep reminding lawmakers of the upcoming problem. While the entitlement crisis has been a hot political issue in the past -- it came up during the 1992 presidential election, with Ross Perot staging TV teach-ins using colored bar-graphs -- few politicians have taken the risk of addressing the problem.

That changed in the late 1990s, when the federal budget went into surplus. People who follow Social Security often cite Bill Clinton's 1999 State of the Union address as the watershed event in this debate. That year, Clinton was the first president since Nixon to have had the convenient problem of deciding what to do with extra money in the Treasury. The Republicans, who controlled both houses of Congress, were pushing for tax cuts -- a surplus, they reasoned, meant that the government was taking in more of the people's money than it needed, so it ought to give some back. Clinton, though, apparently following the CBO's advice, was looking at the long term. "First and above all, we must save Social Security for the 21st century," Clinton said. He proposed spending more than half of future surpluses to bolster Social Security finances, and another 15 percent for Medicare.

In the 2000 election, the entitlement programs became a main domestic policy concern for voters. A Pew poll conducted in October of that year shows that the issue edged out education as the thing that most concerned Americans. Gore made Social Security and Medicare his campaign rallying call, though he did so with notorious awkwardness. In the first presidential debate, Gore tried to interest Americans in the strange budgetary animal known as the "lockbox." (Currently, Social Security is running a surplus, so Gore wanted to ensure, via some kind of legislative mechanism, that the government was permanently prevented from raiding that surplus to meet other, more pressing spending needs.)

Bush declined to sign on to the lockbox idea. But during his campaign Bush did promise not to spend entitlement money on his tax cut. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury secretary, said: "There is room to fit the president-elect's tax proposals into even the low end of the economic assumptions and growth rates that I've looked at without touching any Social Security money. This is -- for him, this is an inviolate principle."

But shortly after Bush's first tax cut was passed, the lockbox was broken. Bush likes to say that terrorism, war and corporate scandals have contributed to the rising deficits, but it was in August 2001 that the CBO first predicted that, in the following fiscal year, federal surpluses would be exhausted and that several billion dollars from Social Security would need to be tapped. In effect, what this means is that the Social Security Administration is lending the Treasury money to run the government. In return for its generosity, the SSA gets special bonds from the Treasury Department representing the money it has given up. These bonds, says David John, an economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, are stored in a special safe at the Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, W.V., and add up to what's known as the "Social Security trust fund." The trust fund is now valued at almost $1.4 trillion. "It's a fireproof safe," says John.

The Social Security "crisis" is predicted to really begin in 2018, when, for the first time, the money the government takes in from Social Security taxes will not be enough to pay for Social Security benefits. At that point, the Treasury will dip into general funds to pay benefits. As a matter of accounting, the Treasury will be giving back the money it borrowed from the SSA, and the SSA will hand in those bonds it has been collecting. But since the Treasury is spending that money now, it will have to borrow the money from someone else. And SSA's bonds will run out in 2041, at which point Social Security will have enough money to pay beneficiaries only three-quarters of what's due to them.

"This is literally the case of knowing that your property taxes are due in November and in January or February you're spending it on other things," John says. "That's going to make November really hard."

Conservatives are right to say that Gore's lockbox would not have solved the Social Security crisis; he was talking about piling up several trillion dollars when what we need is tens of trillions. John, who favors the Bush tax cuts, says, "What he was doing was like paying off your Visa bill knowing that you're going to max off your Visa card again for Christmas." The lockbox didn't do anything to help the long-term health of Social Security -- but it might have provided enough of a cushion to stave off the crisis and figure out some other ways to solve the problem. The Democrats were following what might be called a common-sense rule of budgetary accounting: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Save up your money. The Republicans, on the other hand, want to dig some more on the off chance they may unearth some supply-side pot of gold.

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