Washington spends tens of billions of dollars on failed and outdated programs such as ... the U.S. Geological Survey,

How did the USGS become the favorite icon of Republican budget-cutters? Their name keeps coming up every few years as a favored target of the axe. I wouldn't imagine I need to list the services they provide--is the problem just that they don't have earthquakes on the East Coast? But here's the thing that's always amazed me: USGS maps are the basis of all private property (real estate variety) in America. Seems to me that the last place we want competition is map-making. How'd you like to get into a boundary dispute with your neighbor when you can both buy maps made-to-order from cartographers competing for your business?

A few bullet points later they bring up another favorite shibboleth, "The Conservation Reserve program pays farmers $2 billion annually to not farm their land." That might sound like the ultimate in mindless waste to a lot of people, but you and I were talking about land conservation just recently. We know that there's a very good reason for encouraging farmers to resist the pull of short-term profits and allow their land to lie fallow. Call it what it really is and people would see the value: Dust-bowl prevention.

The reaons I'm griping is that overall the paper was sounding reasonable, until I hit those two land mines of Conservative dogma; and naturally I'm more skeptical of everything else after seeing those signs of ideological spin.

That's too bad, because I think few people would disagree that the government spends too much--to be precise, everybody believes the government is inefficient. But we never get anywhere trying to address the problem through budget cuts, because we simply can't agree on priorities. Is that really so surprising in a democracy?

That's the fundamental flaw in the Republican Starve-the-Beast strategy: It assumes a false symmetry in governmental spending, that expenditures and revenue are tidally-locked by an equation similar to supply-and-demand. Drag down one and the other must follow. Right?

Wrong. It's not symmetrical. While spending can grow (as if) automatically when revenues grow, spending can't be cranked down so easily when revenues shrink. On the upside everybody's share of the pie grows in value and it's goodwill and fraternity and bubbly bipartisanship all around. But on the downside, the hungry piranha turn on each other and blood flows to defend each and every line item. When it comes to budgets, what goes up doesn't have to come down. There is no budget gravity--politicians suck.

The fantasy that you can starve the beast clearly doesn't work, and in fact it's looking like it's going to be a remarkably painful fiasco. All that's left is to enhance the revenue side.

That's got to stick in your craw, I'll bet. The Starve-the-Beast game wasn't so much engineered by reason as it arose from a visceral hatred of government, particularly government taxes. But revenue enhancement doesn't have to mean a higher tax rate. Obviously the third variable in the equation is the size of the economy.

The only viable way out of the mess is to grow the economy.

Don't walk into the paradox: Tax cuts as a prescription to grow the economy simply loop you back around to the reality produced by the tax cuts so far. We need something a little less dogmatic and a little more real.

Got anything besides tax cuts?