That’s my favorite placard from the Washington tea party protests on Saturday. No Child Left a Dime underlines perhaps the central concern of the protesters – the ongoing massive fiscal irresponsibility in Washington by both parties.

We’ve got deficits of more more than $1 trillion for years to come. Federal debt will approach World War Two levels within a decade. Even so, the Democrats are trying to ram through a $1 trillion health care expansion, and the head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is defending against any cuts to Medicare, the program that is the single biggest threat to taxpayers. People are marching not just because Obama and the Democrats are scaring their pants off, but because most Republicans in positions of power are spendthrifts as well.

The chart illustrates that no child will be left a dime because the government will have it all. This is the CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario,” which essentially means the business-as-usual scenario if Congress doesn’t cut anything in coming years.

Note that the most rapidly growing box, the white box, is the program that Michael Steele doesn’t want to touch. The program is expected to grow by 6.3 percent of GDP by 2050. In today’s money, 6.3 percent of GDP is about $900 billion a year in added spending. So it’s like Steele doesn’t see anything wrong with tomorrow’s young families forking over an additional $900 billion a year in taxes on this one program, or about $7,700 a year for every American household.

It’s worse than that. The biggest box on the chart by 2050 is interest on the government debt, and by far the biggest contributor to the growth in interest is Medicare. So including interest, Michael Steele’s (ridiculous) Medicare position is sort of like supporting a more than $10,000 tax hike on every young family for this one program.

Come on Republicans, you can do better than that. How about starting simply by proposing some of CBO’s modest and commonsense Medicare reforms like raising deductibles?

(By the way, interest costs rise in coming years because of an excess of spending, not a shortage of revenues. Under this CBO scenario, all current tax cuts are extended, and yet federal revenues still rise as a share of GDP over time above the historical norm of recent decades).

A Bloomberg story on one cause of the ongoing British economic disaster under Prime Minister Gordon Brown:

Andrew Wesbecher moved to London from New York in 2006 to sell software to banks and hedge funds. This month he joined the exodus of American expatriates fleeing high taxes and the city’s shrinking financial industry … Americans are heading home as Britain plans a 50 percent tax rate for those who earn more than 150,000 pounds ($248,000) a year and employers cut benefits for workers living abroad, reducing the allure of London. That comes a year after the U.K. said foreigners who have lived in the country for more than seven years must pay 30,000 pounds annually or give up the special status that shields overseas income from British taxes.

Since the 1980s, London has boomed as an international city open to the world’s entrepreneurs and their wealth, and perhaps home to more billionaires than any other city. The British economy as a whole has done quite well, pulled ahead by London and driven by a new free-market spirit in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts. Thatcher rightly argued that her cuts to income tax rates “provided a huge boost to incentives, particularly for those talented, internationally mobile people so essential to economic success.”  High tax rates at the top end were a “symbol of socialism” that she wanted to scrap.

Brown is killing the free-market goose that laid the golden eggs of Britain’s success. I really don’t understand the vision of such politicians – don’t they know what they are doing? I want people to be successful. I want entrepreneurs to create wealth. I love growing, vibrant cities.  Why do some people want to destroy all that?