The congressional budget process is always open to fun and games. But just when you thought you have seen it all, an oldie but goodie reappears with a new cover and new twist that makes your head spin back to earlier times.

That’s what happened to me when I recognized a thinly disguised ploy in the current debate over budgetary savings — one that dates back nearly 47 years to the 1981 budget discussions over reconciliation in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Last week, the House and Senate came to a final deal on the concurrent budget resolution for fiscal 2025. It is more than six months overdue, but it is only the beginning of the process of enacting appropriations bills plus complying with reconciliation instructions on such weighty matters as taxes and entitlements.

The big demands the president is making in reconciliation is for Congress to extend expiring tax cuts for middle-income and upper-income taxpayers (plus adding a few new ones), providing more authority and funding for border security, and still reducing the deficit by considerable sums.

Pulling off these tax cuts without raising the deficit has become a game of legislative sleight-of-hand. The Senate did it by calling the extension of President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts part of the “current policy baseline,” thereby not causing a single penny of this $4 trillion expense to........

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