Well, it looks like we're in for a $350 billion tax cut over the next 10 years, and staggering deficits that will put our children and grandchildren in hock way over their eyebrows.

The U.S. Senate, with Dick Cheney emerging from his undisclosed location to cast the tie-breaking vote, passed a budget yesterday that will cut taxes by that amount. It was billed as a setback for the White House, which had the nerve to ask for more than twice that amount in cuts, but even the Senate's smaller tax reductions threaten to bankrupt this country.

As reported in The New York Times today:

The budget plan shows a deficit of $385 billion in the fiscal year 2004, which begins Oct. 1, the largest deficit ever in dollar terms. It projects the deficit to decline annually until the budget is balanced in 2012.

Fiscal experts agree that these calculations are unrealistic. The resolution includes no money for keeping troops in Iraq after Sept. 30 and no funds for postwar reconstruction. It also envisions spending limits lower than Mr. Bush proposed, so low in fact that they would not cover the same level of services the government is providing this year.

The plan also shows military budgets after 2008 that are clearly much lower than the president or the Defense Department sees as adequate.

Well, it's a Republican Congress and a Republican White House, and they just deposed the Devil Incarnate, and darn it if they aren't going to get drunk on tax cuts and let the Democrats pay for it if and when they ever get back in power. They blast the Dems as "tax and spend," but the GOP is just "borrow and spend."

You 20-somethings, get ready to pay through the nose when these debts come due. But don't cry too loudly about it if you voted for this guy: