What Part Of Pay-As-You-Go Is So Incomprehensible?

Asks USA Today. It's about time that someone in the mainstream news media asked this.

Memo to congressional Democrats: It's not 2008 or 2009 anymore. Then, when the nation was facing financial catastrophe, it made sense to borrow as much as necessary to stave off economic depression.

Those days are over. Now it's time to start making choices about what's vital, and for those programs that are, paying the bills instead of borrowing.

You'd think that with the soaring national debt emerging as a major issue in this fall's elections, congressional leaders wouldn't need this kind of reminder. But they began this week pushing two big new spending bills that together would cost more than $230 billion over 10 years. The initial plan, according to one estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, was to pay for less than one-fifth of that and borrow the rest.

This, apparently, is what the leaders consider fiscal responsibility. It makes a mockery of their recent chest-thumping about pay-as-you-go rules, and it sends a signal that unlike most of the rest of the country, Congress still doesn't get it. With the economy finally clinging to a modest recovery, the best way to begin whittling down record deficits— running at a stupefying $1.6 trillion for this year alone — is to stop making them bigger.