By Carl Weiser
Enquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - The federal government is in far deeper financial trouble than anyone wants to admit, Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio said Tuesday.

The budget offices serving Congress and the White House have predicted the government will emerge from deficits in five to 10 years. But Mr. Voinovich said the real numbers show the deficit will keep getting worse.

That's especially bad news for young people, Mr. Voinovich said. Their Social Security benefits will be cut dramatically compared to what their parents got, or their taxes will be much higher.

"The budget accounting the federal government uses is so misleading it would make an Enron accountant blush," Mr. Voinovich, former Ohio governor, said at a news conference. "The public has to understand how dire our circumstances are."

The different predictions - which are almost $1 trillion apart - stem from different assumptions in budgeting. The Congressional Budget Office figures federal spending will increase at the rate of inflation and that tax cuts passed last year will expire in 10 years.

But Mr. Voinovich had the budget office run different numbers. What if federal spending continues growing at the rate it actually has been growing - 8.5 percent per year - over the last four years? And what if, as expected, Congress makes the Bush administration tax cuts permanent?

By 2012, rather than enjoying a surplus of $185 billion to $522 billion (depending on whether Social Security is included), the government would be running deficits of $532 billion to $866 billion. "These are pretty sobering," said Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, founded in 1992 to promote fiscal responsibility.

And with baby boomers hitting retirement, the costs of Social Security and Medicare will only increase.

Mr. Voinovich, who is seeking a seat on the Senate Budget Committee, introduced legislation in October with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., that would provide more accurate budget numbers and make it harder for Congress to spend so much. Mr. Voinovich said he plans to reintroduce the bill in the 108th Congress.

But even he acknowledged that Congress has repeatedly written new rules to keep spending down, then repeatedly found ways around those same rules.

"Around here, nobody wants to make the hard choices. Nobody wants to prioritize. No one wants to say no to anyone," he said.

Still, Mr. Voinovich said he is likely to vote to make the tax cuts enacted last year permanent because to do otherwise would be too disruptive to the economy. And when pressed to name a program he would cut or freeze funding for, Mr. Voinovich declined, saying he had "not looked at that issue."