Republicans in Congress are now struggling to carve some spending cuts out of their recent vast increases in the federal budget.  Democrats, while critical of deficit spending, are helpfully suggesting even more spending increases.  The best quick fix would be to delay the single largest increase in federal spending in forty years: Congress should put implementation of the new Medicare prescription drug program scheduled to begin in 2006 on indefinite hold.

In 2003 the Bush Administration told us, and Congress pretended to believe, that the program would cost $400 billions dollars over the first ten years, and much more thereafter.  There was no explanation of how the government would pay for that much spending. Now we are informed that it will be triple the original estimate—$1.2 trillion—before it starts to get really expensive later. That would pay for recovery from dozens of hurricanes and a handful of wars like Iraq.  It is a financial disaster, and we need to stop the bleeding before it starts.

Some prefer to pay for it by rolling back tax cuts on the “wealthy.”  That’s not nearly enough money.  Others would pay for it by rolling back all of the Bush tax cuts.  They don’t say how those who cannot afford their prescription drugs can afford higher taxes instead.  Unfortunately any tax increases are simultaneously committed many times over to proposed new spending by their advocates. Those who propose more taxes advocated more generous prescription drug benefits in the original bill: $1.2 trillion would not have been enough.  They want new taxes to pay for hurricane recovery efforts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Huge shortfalls in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are also supposedly to be met by rolling back the tax cuts, as are the large increases in subsidies by the Agriculture Department.  Others want these taxes to further increase the huge Bush increase in spending on education.  Ad infinitum.  Tax increases would just be a tidbit swallowed up in the maw of the Leviathan.