Throughout the 2004 campaign season, most Democrats, including their presidential and vice presidential candidates, supported a return to the federal budget rules that helped produce a balanced budget, and then the largest budget surpluses in history, during the 1990s. These rules included "caps" on appropriations, and "pay-as-you-go" rules that required proponents of new spending or tax cuts to identify offsetting spending cuts or revenues to avoid increasing the deficit. They were abandoned when the deficit problem briefly appeared to go away, and most Republicans in Washington have consistently opposed re-establishing them now that GOP governance is creating the largest deficits ever.

But as the Progressive Policy Institute's Paul Weinstein argued recently in Investor's Business Daily, Democrats should champion a whole new generation of budget reform proposals tailored to the extreme nature of the current fiscal crisis, and to the underlying abandonment by the GOP of the bipartisan commitment to fiscal discipline that produced such spectacular results during the Clinton administration.

"The Republican-led Congress is passing pork projects at a rate three times as great as the last time Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress," noted Weinstein, "and it's spending at levels not seen since World War II. Add trillions of dollars in debt-financed tax cuts to the mix, and you have a recipe for fiscal disaster. Clearly, this is not your father's GOP."

In a remarkably short period of time, Republicans have become an unwieldy coalition of free-lunchers and pork-meisters -- who often implicitly embrace the aggressively irresponsible "starve the beast" theory that deliberately engineered budget deficits will someday produce a small, feeble federal government. This degeneration gives Democrats the opportunity to become the unquestioned party of fiscal responsibility, and to bury the old "tax-and-spend big government" stereotypes that Republicans perversely continue to use to great effect.

But taking advantage of that opportunity will require Democrats to embrace much tougher budget reforms than in the past, and also to stand up to the special interests that, in Weinstein's words, "defend an ever-growing litany of spending programs and tax loopholes."

Weinstein's proposed "new tools for budget reform" include:

• An assault on corporate subsidies in both the spending and revenue side of the budget ledger, using a base-closing-commission model to force an up-or-down vote on the whole package;
• A reform that would give the annual Congressional Budget Resolution the force of law, not the optional and toothless instrument it has recently become;
• A requirement for a two-thirds majority in Congress to enact emergency spending and tax breaks;
• A new effort to enact a line-item spending veto that can pass constitutional muster;
• An end to "baseline" budgeting that builds in spending increases each year;
• Establishment of a "rainy day fund" to hedge against economic downturns;
• Legislation to deny bonuses and pay increases to Members of Congress and to executive political appointees so long as budget deficits persist.

These steps, and the larger goal of restoring fiscal responsibility, aren't just a matter of green-eyeshade accounting; they reflect a return to basic honesty in government and the application of middle-class family values to the use of taxpayers' dollars. Stopping the flow of red ink is also increasingly critical to our national economy. As New York Federal Reserve Board president Timothy Geithner warned yesterday, there's a real danger that left unaddressed, our burgeoning deficits could shake the confidence of the international investors who have been financing our debt, and in turn, the health of the U.S. economy.

Finally, Democrats must understand that today's and tomorrow's budget deficits will inevitably make it difficult, if not impossible, to promote truly valuable new public-sector initiatives such as universal access to health care or early childhood education. Becoming complicit in the conservative claim that all government spending is equal -- and equally wasteful -- represents both a political and a moral betrayal of true public-sector activism.

As Weinstein noted, becoming the party of fiscal responsibility "will come with a price, but the rewards will be far greater for the party, and more important, the country."