"The result is to effectively surrender 80 percent of what Democrats once hoped to add to the president's top line," reported the Wall Street Journal's David Rogers.

Even so, Bush's victory comes at an enormous price, as the budget's list of 696 pages of earmarks makes so painfully clear.

The Democrats ran on reining in pork-barrel spending and ending the earmark abuses, but this grotesquely overweight budget is proof that they have failed to keep their promise -- and never had any intention of doing so.

In the meantime, Clinton, her Democratic presidential rivals and the leadership of their party are promising to raise taxes if they win back the White House.

Their argument is twofold: First, that Bush's tax cuts slashed taxes on the wealthy and they do not pay their fair share. Second, there is not enough money flowing into the U.S. Treasury to cut the deficit. Translation: not enough money to pay for the Democrats' big spending promises.

But the Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office released IRS tax-revenue numbers for 2005 last week, showing that the wealthiest 1 percent of all income earners paid 39 percent of all income taxes that year. The top 5 percent, which earned 36 percent of all income, paid nearly 60 percent of all income taxes. And the wealthiest 10 percent paid 70 percent.

The IRS showed that, since the Bush tax cuts have been enacted, the level of income taxes that the richest Americans paid has risen every year. Notably, taxpayers below the median-income level -- half of all households -- paid 3 percent of all income taxes.

Then there is the claim that the Treasury needs more of our money to pay its bills. Clinton says that if she is elected president in 2008, she will push the top income tax rate to nearly 40 percent from the 35 percent rate we have now.

But this year's waste-ridden budget -- spending $12 billion on projects the government didn't ask for -- suggests that maybe Congress is getting too much of our money as it is.