My op-ed in today's YDN on shifting the discourse of "fiscal responsibility" is on-line here:

This week, President Bush presented Congress and the American people with a budget with steep cuts in job training, affordable housing and Medicare. It's a budget that calls on poor kids to do without health class, poor families to do with heating and poor communities to do without wastewater treatment plants. Not everyone, however, is called upon to sacrifice for the common good. While those with the least wealth among us brace for a further assault on their economic security, those with the most can look forward, if Bush has his way, to further tax cuts -- all in the name of fiscal responsibility. All this from a man who transformed a near-$6 trillion surplus into a half-trillion dollar deficit and his campaign pledge of fiscal responsibility into a punch line. Bush's surplus-slaying ways made shows of dismay pro forma for every self-respecting conservative pundit. "Among conservative journalists and activists," Jonah Goldberg wrote in late 2003, "the disappointment in the Bush administration's, and the GOP congressional leadership's, domestic policies is mounting daily." Even the International Monetary Fund has begun issuing warnings about American debt. Politicians and pundits from across the political spectrum have rightly assailed the president for saddling future generations with crippling debt. As Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid observed last week, it means a $36,000 "birth tax" on every future American left holding the bill. President Bush should not be surprised to find few Americans comforted by his claim that he can halve the deficit in his second term -- a claim based on math that fails to account for the ongoing costs of his dire misadventure in Iraq, the trillions in debt required to enact his erosion of social security, or the ballooning price tag of extending his disastrous tax cuts. Democrats have been right to join with conservatives in slamming Bush for sinking the federal government deep in the red. Deficits are bad for America. Balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable members of our society, however, is worse. That's why congressional Democrats and Cato Institute libertarians, who've found common cause in slamming Bush's deficits, should have little common ground in confronting Bush's budget.

More on this here.