RUDOLF GOLDSCHEID a German sociologist from early in the last century, famously said that a government's "budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies." Sadly, most journalists are stuck in the realm of ideology. To get beyond the ideological would require studying some numbers, which is beyond the capabilities of your average newspaper hack, who'd prefer transmitting a lifeless soundbite from Dennis Hastert to firing up Excel. So what is the ideological strip show going on in Washington telling us?

In the broadest terms, fiscal politics today is dominated by two forms of conservatism -- a tax-cutting right-wing pseudo-populism, and an establishmentarian austerity fever. The first, manifested in extreme form by Congressional Republicans and in milder form by the White House, has its popular base among small business interests and arriviste entrepreneurs; its theorists work at places like the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. They're reminiscent of Reagan's early days, though without the genial smile and the shimmer of madness. And the second has its popular base among Wall Street Democrats -- not exactly the masses; its theorists work in the economics departments of brand-name universities, orthodox think tanks, and the editorial page of the New York Times. A generation ago they would have been WASPy, striped-pants Republicans; today, they're what pass in public life as "progressives."

But all this is still in the ideological realm, violating the injunction to look at the numbers. And those reveal a lot less difference between the two right wings than you might imagine from the rhetoric. Though Clinton always claimed his budgets were "investing in people" and nurturing the environment, the dollars were never there to back up the ad copy. In his last budget, he proposed shrinking the federal government's expenditures between 2000 and 2005 by 1.1% of GDP. That would have been on top of a decline of over four percentage points in the federal share of GDP during his two terms, down to the lowest levels since 1966. Bush won't release detailed budget documents for another few weeks, but in the sketchy "blueprint" published on February 28, he proposed shrinking it by 0.8% of GDP -- less than his "big-spending" predecessor.

These are bottom-line numbers, but differences between Bush and Clinton's fiscal preferences aren't visible to the naked eye -- at least at the level of the broad categories in Bush's blueprint. Bush would spend slightly less than Clinton on "income security" and slightly more on the military -- but also slightly more on health. For all his talk about boosting the federal role in education, Bush would increase spending by 0.06% of GDP, admittedly more than Clinton, who would have left the education share unchanged.

The real differences between the two parties are visible on the tax side, with Bush and the Congressional Republicans competing to see who can most generously ease the crushing burden on millionaires, and the Democrats scrambling in defense of the multitrillion dollar surplus. Projected surplus, that is. There's no precedent in the history of the U.S. or any other country for sustained surpluses on the scale everyone assumes is a dead certainty.

Bush and his Congressional allies can sustain their populist appeal by claiming -- accurately -- that almost everyone will get a break under their various proposals, and that millions of poor taxpayers will be relieved entirely of paying income taxes. Of course, they play all kinds of numbers games to hide the fact that the average household would see something like $320 in tax relief (less than a dollar a day) while George and Laura, with their income of $2 million a year, would get a break of $100,000 (about $264 dollars a day).*

Congressional Democrats are offering a slightly less lopsided proposal, but hardly anything to go to the barricades over; they're dreadfully fearful of being perceived as fiscally irresponsible. So profoundly has the spirit of Andrew Mellon possessed "progressive" opinion that the Peoples Weekly World, the Communist Party's newspaper, recently cited AFL-CIO president John Sweeney's complaint that the Republicans would "squander the surplus" with approval!

As for single-payer health insurance, infrastructure repair, environmental reconstruction, clean energy R&D -- well, not a word really. They would be irresponsible. This may be the dullest strip show of all time.

*Yearly tax-break figures compiled by the Citizens for Tax Justice.