America needs a wartime budget. We need a budget that will provide the resources necessary to win the war on terrorism, that will stimulate our economy without aggravating our long term deficits, and that will protect and reform Social Security and Medicare, but not finance the war out of its trust funds. In sum, our country needs a budget that will call on the American people to make sacrifices to win, sacrifices they are willing to make if only their leaders will have the courage to ask, and speak plainly.

The President’s budget is not there yet. The budget we will vote on in the House this week calls for the most significant increase in military spending in more than two decades, and that increase will enjoy bipartisan support. The budget also proposes significant new tax cuts and making last year’s tax cuts permanent. Domestic spending increases only slightly or remains flat.

And the budget requires sacrifice. There is only one problem: It is not we who are being made to sacrifice. It is our children.

Advocates of the budget call it balanced. Regrettably, it is anything but balanced. The $2.1 trillion budget uses $200 billion in Social Security trust funds to pay for other programs, spends all of the Medicare surplus on priorities other than paying down the national debt, fails to count the cost of the $43 billion economic stimulus package just signed by the President, assumes that spending levels on domestic priorities will be reduced (including the President’s own education initiative) and that mammoth problems like the growth of the Alternative Minimum Tax (“AMT”) will go unaddressed.

But even these glaring omissions are not enough to “balance” the budget. The gimmickry goes further: The budget addresses only the next five years - not ten - to hide big late-year costs, and the budget relies on the White House’s own budget numbers rather than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”) estimates which are more conservative. Although institutional memories are short, none will forget that only six years ago the House Republicans shut the government down twice when President Clinton failed to use CBO estimates to balance the budget.

It is no wonder that Secretary of the Treasury O’Neill will soon be before Congress asking us to raise the debt limit so that the United States of America can borrow another $750 billion - on top of the $5.9 trillion we already owe - to continue paying its bills. Only last year, the Secretary predicted that an increase in the debt limit would not be necessary for seven years, and the President and Congress vowed we would never dip into Social Security.

It is true that the war on terrorism and long-deferred improvements to our military readiness have required the largest increase in the defense budget in two decades. But this increase of $45 billion in military costs and almost $20 billion in homeland security are but a fraction of the multi-trillion change in the nation’s economic projections over the next ten years. The tax cut and recession played a much more significant role in expending the anticipated surplus, with the recession having the largest impact in the short term and the tax cuts playing a more prominent role in the long term.

But whatever the causes of our current economic shortfall, the fact remains that the Administration has yet to come up with an intermediate or long-term plan to restore balance to our budget and stop deficit spending. When we had a $5.6 trillion surplus and no war, we could afford a substantial tax cut and I supported the President. But now we are at war, we have no surplus and we are spending the Social Security trust fund. To propose dramatic new tax cuts at a time like this, or make permanent others before it is clear we can afford them, means financing the war out of our parents’ retirement and our children’s education. This just isn’t right.

While it may be necessary to deficit spend during the short term - while we are at war and not yet recovered from the recession - Congress should work with the Administration to develop a balanced budget for America’s future that does not rely on raiding Social Security. Everything must be on the table. Secretary O’Neill’s request for a mammoth increase in our national debt should be rejected in favor of a small short-term increase and a plan to return our country to balanced budgets.

America has always been willing to sacrifice to win its wars. She still is. But she must be asked by leaders who are willing to speak candidly about what is at stake and what it will take to win. She must be asked by those with faith in the essential generosity of the American people and who will not tell us that we can have our cake and eat it too. Our prosperity and that of our children may depend on it.