The Republicans' budget, which aims to reduce budget deficits over the next seven years and balance the budget in 2002, shows the perfidy that permeates Washington, D.C.

Congressional leaders pared the House's earlier budget version to muster enough votes to pass the budget this week. By clinching deals with lawmakers, GOP leaders got their budget, but at the expense of the kind of far-reaching reforms that are the key to this nation's economic health.

Weak-kneed Republicans, though, were towering statesmen compared to the Democrats.

On Wednesday, President Clinton said the GOP proposal plundered programs for the vulnerable, tossed tax cuts at wealthy people who don't need them, and diverted money for education, the environment and other programs.

Congressional Democrats echoed the president. Sen. James Exon, D-Neb., even had the chutzpah to say the Republican budget "fires the first shot of class warfare."

But class warfare is the Democrats' bloody game. They continually play their goodies-grabbing poor constituents against the well-off who must "pay their fair share" of taxes. Since working poor and middle class voters far outnumber the wealthy, the politics of envy typically win out. How else do you explain a tiny segment of the population -- the wealthy -- paying a majority of taxes and then asked to pay even more in the name of fairness?

Aside from their demagoguery, Democrats ignore the truth in this debate. The truth is the budget will grow under the Republican plan. Granted, it doesn't grow as much as President Clinton proposed at the beginning of the year. But the idea is to balance a budget that's annually hundreds of billion of dollars in the red.

Yet we hear from Democrats and the national media that a 47 percent spending increase over the next seven years is a callous cut. We also hear that a similar increase in tax revenue is a tax cut.

In fact, the Republican proposal increases spending by $350 billion over the next seven years. That money will go toward entitlements -- primarily Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and interest on the debt.

What about GOP cuts in the student loan program, which the president decried in a recent visit to Southern Illinois University? The money available for student loans will increase from $6.6 million to $7.1 million, and there will be no reduction in the interest-rate subsidies given to eligible students.

But there are still the tax cuts. Why should the rich get a tax break when we're trying to balance the budget? There are many reasons to justify a tax break for the rich: The rich are the bearers of capital, and if you let them use more of it, they'll expand their businesses, hire more workers and feed the economy. But these arguments are moot. The fact is, taxpayers with incomes less than $75,000 make up more than 90 percent of those who will get the $500 per-child tax credit that is proposed.

In this budget there are no tax breaks for the rich. There are no savage cuts of benefits to the poor and elderly. There is only a watered-down document of modest reforms aimed at getting our nation's fiscal house in order not next year, but in seven years.

Still President Clinton vows a veto. Since the GOP lacks the votes to overturn a veto, there will be further compromise before the limp budget becomes law.

When it does, the victims in its wake won't be starving school children or sick senior citizens. One victim will be the Constitution, which continues to be ignored to justify the legal extortion that we call a national budget. Another victim is the American public, which must abide elected representatives who cut back-room deals and cave to lobbyist pressure to preserve the misuse of taxpayers' money. No less serious is the damage done to our language and, ultimately, truth.

No. 8 on Historian Paul Johnson's "Pillars of Society" is the admonishment to "Beware of those who seek to win an argument at the expense of the language."

Johnson adds: "For the fact that they do so is proof positive that their argument is false, and proof presumptive that they know it is. A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meanings of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones."

Congressional Democrats give new meaning to anti-social pursuits.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.