About to burst: taxes and spending will soon go crazy.

TAXES are going to go up. That's not a prediction about what the Democratic Congress is going to do about President Bush's tax cuts. Even if they make all of those tax cuts permanent, taxes are still going to go up--automatically, with no vote by the Congress. Spending is going to go up, too--way up. Conservatives have no plan to solve these problems. They don't seem to be aware that the tax problem even exists.

The major reason taxes are going to go up is that our tax code gives the government a disproportionate share of the proceeds from economic growth. As the economy grows, people move into higher tax brackets. So average tax rates go up.

Actually, you don't even need to move into a higher tax bracket to end up paying higher average tax rates. Let's say we had a flat tax of 17 percent on all income above $15,000. Let's say you get a raise from $25,000 to $30,000. Before the raise, you paid $1,700 in taxes, 6.8 percent of your income. Afterward, you pay $2,550, or 8.5 percent.

This kind of "bracket creep" is more benign than the old kind. In the late 1970s, taxpayers found that inflation was putting them in higher tax brackets. Even when they were not making any more money in real terms, the government was ...