Where's the fiscal outrage?

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We have just closed the books on fiscal 2003, and all that can be said is: Good riddance. This was one of the worst years for fiscal conservatives in many moons. The federal budget grew by more than $150 billion -- more than twice as much as any year that Bill Clinton was in the White House -- and deficit spending eclipsed $300 billion, a 10-year high.

This Republican Congress is spending at a faster pace than any Congress since before the days of Woodstock and the Miracle Mets.

Milton Friedman, the revered Nobel Prize-winning economist, declares this unbridled spending "is the single greatest deterrent to faster economic growth in the United States today."

Another Nobel Prize economist, James Buchanan, worries that by allowing government to grow so rapidly ahead of the pace of the private sector, we are "killing the goose of free enterprise that lays the golden eggs."

And Republicans are joining Democrats in the slaying.

A new Institute for Policy Innovation report chronicles the budget orgy. "What we have in Washington today," it glumly notes, "is a bipartisan fiscal cop-out. No one in Congress or the executive branch has insisted that federal tax dollars be spent judiciously." Yet, examples of waste and fraud in the federal budget have reached gargantuan proportions. Here are some recent examples that incite only yawns from Washington policymakers:

• The General Accounting Office (GAO) recently found that the Pentagon "reported an estimated $22 billion in disbursements that it has been unable to match with corresponding obligations." In other words, the Pentagon somehow lost track of what happened to the money.

• An audit of Medicare discovered the federal government made $12.5 billion in erroneous payments in fiscal 2001.

• The food stamp program routinely sends out food vouchers to ineligible families. It's difficult to estimate the amount of waste here the last couple of years, because the federal government recently loosened the state reporting requirements substantially. In 2000, the last year that estimates were provided, improper food stamp payments cost more than $1 billion.