Hurricane Rita is moving inland today, adding to the human and financial costs of Hurricane Katrina. Yet when it comes to taxes and spending, Washington acts as if nothing has happened.

True, a group of very conservative Republicans issued a list of program cuts on Wednesday under the imposing name "Operation Offset." The cuts that the Republican Study Committee proposed have won their sponsors praise for making "tough choices." Of course, the sponsors won't actually have to live with these cuts, because Republican leaders dismissed most of the reductions, especially in congressional pet projects and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

And it's hard to give the fiscal conservatives too much credit since they would cut $80 billion from Medicare and $50 billion from Medicaid over five years, and suggest reductions in school lunches, rent subsidies for the poor and foreign aid, among other things. The idea seems to be that to help Katrina's poor and suffering victims, other poor and suffering people will have to sacrifice.

Nonetheless, permit me to offer a little cheap grace on these conservatives. At least the "Operation Offset" crowd has produced this list of cuts and forced their own leaders to disown them. The exchange showed how fundamentally stupid our budget policies have been over the last five years -- and, yes, I'll defend that strong word.

Here's a fact getting far too little attention: The cost this year alone of the Bush tax cuts already enacted in 2001 and 2003 comes to $225 billion. In other words, the revenue lost because of tax cuts going through this year without any congressional action would more than pay the costs of Katrina recovery.

Why describe our government's fiscal policies as "stupid," rather than, say, "ill-advised" or "misguided"? The softer words of conventional opinion-writing imply disagreement but suggest an honest coherence in the other side's view.

But our current budget policies are built not upon honest coherence but on incoherence or, even worse, a dishonest coherence. The president and members of Congress always insist they are fiscal conservatives who truly believe in balanced budgets. Yet their actions bear no relationship to their words, and labels such as "conservative" have no connection to their policies. Our federal purse strings are in the hands of fiscal radicals.

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