Finger-pointing and other fiscal follies.

ITEM: The president previewed his budget message in remarks in Peoria, Illinois. As reported by Reuters on January 30: "President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he plans to submit a budget proposal for fiscal 2008 that would pave the way for the government to balance its budget by 2012 while still keeping taxes low. 'I'm going to submit a budget for Congress to look at that shows how we can balance the budget in five years and keep your taxes low,' he said in a speech to workers of heavy equipment maker Caterpillar."

ITEM: In a column appearing in the Indianapolis Star for February 2, headlined "A New Budget, A New Day," commentator David Broder wrote: "Next Monday is the real day of reckoning for President Bush and this new Democratic Congress. That is the day the president sends his budget for next year up to Capitol Hill, and you really will be able to judge by the reaction what will happen in Washington in the next nine months. This year, as I learned from conversations with two senior White House officials last week, the president hopes his budget will become a starting point for serious negotiation--not a partisan football or simple laughingstock."

Broder continued: "That hope was encouraged by a letter to the president last week from the Democratic leaders" of the House and Senate, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, and the chairmen of the two Budget committees, Rep. John Spratt and Sen. Kent Conrad. The fist sentence said, 'We are writing to express our strong interest in working cooperatively with you to address our nation's fiscal challenges.' It acknowledged that as the process unfolds, 'Democrats' and Republicans will disagree about particular priorities, and we will need to negotiate our differences in deciding how to allocate scarce resources.'"

CORRECTION: Considering recent history, it's doubtful that the president's remarks about balancing the budget--even balancing the budget in 2012, five years from now--were much more than rhetoric. Similarly, there is little doubt how the Democrat-run Congress will respond to any attempt at frugality: negatively. Both the president and the Congress obviously intend to squander monies that don't belong to them, arguing only about the size of the figurative pyramids they are erecting.

Indeed, after the president's State of the Union address in January, when he spoke about trying create incentives for Americans to buy their own health insurance, a spokesman for the supposedly cooperative Senate leader Harry Reid noted above commented: "It's difficult to imagine a proposal like this making it through the House or the Senate." Representative Pete Stark (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee, acknowledged that his panel wouldn't even consider the president's proposal. Other Democratic leaders took similar swings at other pitches by the president.

Keep in mind that most of the president's trial balloons in the State of the Union speech could hardly be considered conservative. The opposition of the Democratic leadership was hardly a matter of principle. The Washington Post noted the decidedly cool reception of congressional leaders: "In an overture to the new majority in Congress, President Bush strayed into Democratic territory last night with proposals on health insurance, gasoline efficiency and even the first real tax increase of his presidency. Rhetorically, the shift was remarkable. The language he used to sell his health plan dwelled on the plight of the uninsured and on a tax on the well-to-do, a pitch that Republicans have dismissed as class warfare. His energy plan asked for new authority to raise automotive fuel-efficiency standards, a regular theme of the Democratic Party's liberal wing. But senior Democrats for the most part responded with icy disdain."

Try as he might, the president won't be able to get to the left of the most liberal Democrats. The predictable result, however, will be a government that grows more expensive and intrusive.