Pay as you go? Ha!

The House of Representatives voted 265-166 last week for a Democratic "pay as you go" bill that would require automatic, across-the-board spending cuts should a year-end review show that new appropriations do not balance with revenues.

If you're waiting for a punch line and a rim shot, you've ridden this merry-go-round before, haven't you?

It sounds like a joke, given that Congress consistently underestimates the cost of every program it initiates, and in this manner has loaded us up with an extra half-trillion dollars of debt each year, an achievement it will doubtless outdo this year. And it is a joke, of course, though one which the Washingtonians manage to tell with a straight face, thanks to long practice.

Social Security, Medicaid and food stamp payments are exempt from this scam for starters; all kinds of spending is "off budget," and Congress allows itself to treat all kinds of borrowing from foreigners (dubbed "sale of Treasury bills") as "revenue," without explaining how or when they ever plan to pay it all back.

Republicans complained the bill was even weaker than the shams enacted in previous years. They offered an alternative that would have put "tighter" caps on spending. (Note the flexible and highly relative term "tighter" -- let's not pretend most of these weak sisters would eliminate all spending not specifically authorized in the Constitution. Though at least they made some demonstration.)

Democrats rebuffed that modest effort, 259-169, explaining the GOP proposal -- and here we quote Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault -- "focused too much on cutting spending and not enough on raising taxes as a way to achieving a pay-as-you-go balance."

Democrats as our leading party of tax-and-spend? As Southern Nevada's own freshman Democrat, Dina Titus, has been known to ask: "Where you gettin' that? Where you gettin' that?"