by Jules Witcover

The federal budget season is upon us once again, with figures of incomprehensible dimensions being flung around by Republicans and Democrats alike as they vie for support from a general public generally baffled by it all.

The Republicans, riding the tailwind of their midterm congressional victories and a Tea Party movement driven by wishful thinking more than by reality, have gone into full-throated slash-and-burn mode. They're determined to ring $100 billion from the deficit this year, whatever the damage to the nation's social safety net.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are equally determined to salvage as much as they can of programs that epitomize their philosophy of government as an agent of beneficent change. The Obama administration is taking a budgetary middle road of some cuts and some new spending.

Of the two approaches, the Republican version will be easiest to sell among the conservative faithful but harder to achieve, given the continued Democratic control of the Senate. The Democratic version will be the opposite -- harder to sell among the liberal faithful but easier to achieve in compromise with the Republicans that seems the most likely outcome.

Once again, as has always the case in these ideological face-offs, the battleground will be in the area of discretionary non-defense spending. That is, a wide berth is being given to where the real targets are -- the huge entitlement programs mandated by law like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Obama's budget for fiscal 2012 instead accepts cuts in more than 200 domestic spending programs, some of which he earlier embraced, as evidence of his willingness to do business with the Republicans. But he counters them with new spending to bankroll his State-of-the-Union pitch for "winning the future" through increased education, energy, infrastructure and innovation outlays.

In other words, the president, while nodding to the public clamor for deficit reduction, will continue to cope with the residual challenge of economic recovery and try to keep on track some semblance of his 2008 pledge of change. It calls for a tough juggling act from which he can expect little Republican help.

The opposition party, for its part, is bent on continuing its consequences-be-damned efforts to put the brakes on the traditional Democratic agenda in the realm of social welfare. The centerpiece all the last year has been the drive to repeal the new health-care insurance law, purposefully labeled Obamacare for maximum derogation, and it continues.

The Republican budget counterproposals are on the same basic path taken about 15 years ago when then House Speaker Newt Gingrich ranted about the Democratic "welfare state" and forced a brief federal government shutdown. That strategy proved disastrous to his party and later was widely credited with resurrecting the presidency of Bill Clinton and assuring his reelection in 1996.

With another deadline for funding the government approaching on March 4, the Republicans are again demanding deep budget cuts as their price for an extension. It may be more than the Democrats can hope for that the new GOP Speaker, John Boehner, will knowingly go over that same cliff Gingrich jumped off this time around.

In all this, the areas of federal spending where cuts must be made if the deficit monkey is ever to be pried from the country's back -- the mandatory entitlements and the price of America's huge defense establishment -- are being danced around for another year.

Raising the eligibility age for Medicare, for example, seems to be the latest political third rail that Congress is scared stiff of touching.

And although all U.S. military are to leave Iraq by the end of this year and combat forces are to start leaving Afghanistan in July, the Obama budget price tag for both is still a whopping $118 billion, plus $12.8 billion more for Afghanistan security forces.

Obama's continuation of the radical Bush foreign policy in the Middle East remains a huge drain American resources now and at least in the near future. As long as the United States continues to play policeman in that part of the world, the nation's needs at home, borne heavily these days by the poor, will be shortchanged in that other war against the soaring federal deficit.

 

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