Remember deficit hawks? Warren Rudman? Ross Perot? Lead or Leave? Whatever happened to those flinty folks, anyway? I've been thinking that they were all forcibly transported to one of Dick Cheney's undisclosed locations, but, lo and behold, one emerged in yesterday's New York Times Magazine -- Pete Peterson, railing against his fellow Republicans:

Coming into power, the Republican leaders faced a choice between tax cuts and providing genuine financing for the future of Social Security. (What a landmark reform this would have been!) They chose tax cuts. After 9/11, they faced a choice between tax cuts and getting serious about the extensive measures needed to protect this nation against further terrorist attacks. They chose tax cuts. After war broke out in the Mideast, they faced a choice between tax cuts and galvanizing the nation behind a policy of future-oriented burden sharing. Again and again, they chose tax cuts.

The recent $10 trillion deficit swing is the largest in American history other than during years of total war....

You might suppose that a reasoned debate over this deficit-happy policy would at least be admissible within the ''discussion tent'' of the Republican Party. Apparently, it is not. I've seen Republicans get blackballed for merely observing that national investment is limited by national savings; that large deficits typically reduce national savings; or that higher deficits eventually trigger higher interest rates. I've seen others get pilloried for picking on the wrong constituency -- for suggesting, say, that a tax loophole for a corporation or wealthy retiree is no better, ethically or economically, than a dubious welfare program.

For some ''supply side'' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a tax-cut theology that simply discards any objective evidence that violates the tenets of the faith.

Peterson, like all deficit hawks, also whacks the Democrats (for "dubious" social programs -- presumably anything introduced or proposed after 1960). Still, his condemnation of GOP orthodoxy is a hell of a lot more full-throated than what most Democrats seem able to muster. (I wonder if Peterson's article helped inspire this John Kerry statement.)

Elsewhere in the Times Magazine, this is not a bad explanation of why Bush tax policy is bad for you -- by all means share it with centrist friends who might not grasp that reduced federal taxes mean reduced federal revenues, which mean reduced money for state and, ultimately, local programs, which is why the local prison is turning away prisoners and the local roads are filled with potholes. What's missing from the article is what's missing from all refutations of right-wing tax orthodoxy: a challenge to the notion, implicit in all right-wing thinking, that we can have all the government services we need and lower taxes because there's just so much government waste. No conservative is ever expected to prove that this is so. Instead, we get dishonest proof-by-anecdote -- in this case, the vile Grover Norquist sneering at tax-sponsored sex-change operations. Look, I've heard of these operations being paid for out of government funds, and you can certainly argue against that, but does Wisconsin, say, fully fund 88 such operations a day, 365 days a year, at $100,000 a pop? Because that's how many sex-change operations would have to be dropped from Wisconsin's budget to close the $3.2 billion budget gap the Times article tells us it has. And I don't know that Wisconsin (ex-governor: Tommy Thompson) has ever funded even one such operation. But nobody ever calls a guy like Norquist on something like this. Nobody ever shoves a budget under his nose and says, "OK, show me all the cuts you'd make to balance this and pay for your wish list of tax cuts." Nobody ever does this to him, and it should be done to him as often as humanly possible.