One thing you rarely see in tax and budget reporting is an explicit juxtaposition of the cost of domestic discretionary spending with tax cuts. As the Washington Post reports today, President Bush is fighting fiercely over relatively small differences in domestic discretionary spending while advocating an unfunded fix of the alternative minimum tax that dwarfs the savings from limiting spending growth:

In his first six years in office, Bush accepted domestic discretionary spending increases from Republican-controlled Congresses that averaged 7 percent a year, said Brian Riedl, a conservative budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. In his showdown with the current Democratic Congress, the president is insisting on spending growth of 4 percent at most.

But as he stood his ground, first against $22 billion in additional domestic spending, then against $11 billion, Bush steadfastly opposed Democratic efforts to raise taxes to recoup the cost of a $50 billion measure that would stave off the growth of the alternative minimum tax (AMT). The parallel tax system was created in 1969 to ensure that a few rich Americans could not avoid paying taxes altogether, but because it was not indexed to inflation, it now threatens more than 20 million upper-middle-income households.

If, as expected, Congress passes a bill without making up the lost revenue, the cost to the Treasury would swamp the savings from Bush’s spending fight.

The more general pattern here is that conservatives routinely blame government red ink on domestic discretionary spending — particularly earmarks — while advocating tax cuts that cost vastly more than any feasible reduction in domestic spending. Journalists should put these two ideas in tension with each other more often.