The federal government will borrow $4 million in the time it takes you to read this column.

Congress and the president have proposed a 2006 budget that will mean borrowing $1.4 billion a day.

Until the last month, the White House and the Republican-led Congress have shown little interest in this problem. In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney famously said, ``Deficits don't matter.''

I think they do. We are saddling our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt, which as of today averages about $24,000 each.

This week the House will debate and vote on a budget reconciliation bill that purports to cut $53.9 billion in spending over five years. That's about 2 percent of the projected deficit. The cuts will fall heavily on low-income and middle-class families.

The biggest cuts are in student loans ($14.3 billion) and Medicaid ($11.9 billion). It also mandates reductions in school lunch, foster care, long-term care and child support enforcement, among others.

Spending restraint is admirable, but the $50 billion in cuts proposed by the Republican Congress will be offset by a companion bill that extends tax cuts to heavily favor the top 1 percent (those who earn more than $300,000 per year), at a cost of $70 billion over the same period.

The White House says the tax cuts will trickle down to increase investment, create jobs and eventually cut the deficit. But real world experience shows that the spending cuts along with the tax cuts will actually add $20 billion to the federal deficit.

Better and bigger cuts can be made, but they would inevitably be opposed by the powerful special interests who seem to dominate Washington these days. We could cut corporate farm subsidies and subsidies to farmers with more than $100,000 in annual income, saving $25 billion.

We could cancel the fanciful and defective ``Star Wars'' system and the Cold War-era F-22 fighter jet, saving a total of $60 billion. We could cancel the manned return to the moon mission, saving $50 billion. We could reduce corporate subsidies in the new Medicare prescription drug program, saving $10 billion. We could reduce the number of consultants employed by the federal government by 150,000, saving $33 billion. And we could bring the Unites States occupation in Iraq to a planned end, redeploy some troops to Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden, and bring the rest of the troops home, saving at least $50 billion a year.

Spending cuts for those few programs total almost five times the cuts in the Republican-proposed "budget reconciliation," without hitting struggling families.

But even the deepest cuts will not get the budget back to balance. If we eliminated all federal programs - agriculture, education, centers for disease control, federal courts, prisons, the IRS, etc. - except some Homeland Security agencies and the Department of Defense, we would still have a deficit. We simply cannot continue to finance tax cuts for big corporations and the top 1 percent with borrowed money. It's time they begin to shoulder some of the load carried by America's working families and retirees.

Instead of extending new tax cuts for earners over $300,000, let's restore the rates they paid during the booming 1990s. That would reduce the projected deficit by $327 billion in five short years. If we restricted offshore tax shelters, we could reduce the deficit at least another $33 billion. If we reinstated the Superfund tax so polluters paid to clean up their own messes, we could drop it another $10 billion. Limiting the estate tax exemption to $6 million and progressively taxing larger estates could cut the deficit by $31 billion a year.

If my proposals were adopted, we would reduce the projected deficit by more than half a trillion dollars over five years.

It doesn't solve the problem entirely, but it doesn't complicate the problem like the "budget reconciliation" does, by adding $20 billion to the deficit. Better yet, it wouldn't cut a single student's college loan, reduce school lunches for hungry kids or burden states with more Medicaid costs. Federal budgets are about priorities and tough choices.

This week, the priorities of the White House and Republican leadership in the House of Representatives are clear for all to see as they try to ram through a bill that will hurt working families while protecting elite, wealthy special interests.

Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Springfield, represents Oregon's 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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