Recall reading of those halcyon days before the feds rudely intervened on the poor's behalf? Aside from serial and safety-netless economic depressions, disinterested state governments, depleted community chests, overburdened charitable church funds, financially strapped benevolent societies, severe malnutrition, untreated disease, merciless industrial-workplace conditions, and overcrowded hovels with overflowing sewage as playground props, the poor always had a gay-'90s time of it. Such pastimes as the challenge of surviving a 300-calorie diet or guessing which offspring would live to the age of 5 kept them vibrant, lighthearted, and blissfully independent. Assuming you had one, there was no place like home, free of federal guarantees.

Should your social history recall be a bit rusty, not to worry, for the Bush administration is doing its damnedest to recreate America in the image of Grover Cleveland. The Boy King hasn't read of, and doesn't understand the lessons of, the past, so he admires it immensely. His 2004 budget plan -- which, with Republican control of both houses, is likely to survive largely intact -- is a reactionary blueprint for the reconstruction of Gilded Age social brutality.

Combined with the effects of 2001's tax cuts, Bush proposes slashing nearly $3 trillion from federal revenues over the next 10 years. Since the mother lode of those lost revenues will wind up in fat-cat bank accounts, tax-free inheritances and gauche consumption, someone else must sacrifice for Croesus's good. According to compassionate conservative doctrine, that someone else is properly the poor -- and anyone else dangling below the plutocratic poverty line -- as the president's budget makes clear.

Naturally as we prosecute the war against terrorism against all foes except actual terrorists, the military and its private contractors are plentifully provided for. What your Social Security and Medicare trust-fund money doesn't cover for Pentagon doo-hickeys, W simply puts on a tab -- courtesy your children and grandchildren. In coming years the interest alone on the national debt will ensure them extortionist taxation and prohibitive mortgage rates -- on top of having to provide for you in your old age -- so they might as well start honing their poverty-coping skills now. The little buggers should be content, however, just knowing it's their contribution to stamping out ever-changing axes of evil and Bush IV's standard of living.

The president's budget does not entirely throw fiscal prudence to the wind. It seeks to keep annual deficits in the "manageable" range of $300 billion over the next couple years. (They more accurately are sure to be in the $400 to $500 billion-dollar range, say many economists. But let us not quibble. The administration itself admits the debut of unprecedented national indebtedness, so what's another $100 billion tossed on the public heap of fiscal liability?) In furtherance of conservative economics, the White House intends to achieve those quite manageable deficits by whacking away at waste. The Bush league's internal translation: whatever benefits the poor.

Medicaid and housing assistance programs, for instance, are slated for state, rather than federal, management. Each of the 50 states would be authorized to set its own eligibility and spending standards, which means the programs would be doomed as far as fair and equitable application. After all, that's why the feds got involved in the first place: state government exercised neither care nor responsibility for the indigent.

Of course there are numerous other villains that threaten comfortable deficits of only a few hundred billion. Among them are literacy programs; job training; the earned income tax credit; and perhaps most unconscionable of all -- yes indeed -- those outrageous school lunch subsidies. So long as there's one reasonably fed tyke out there offensively choking down a 10-cent hot dog at the Yacht Club's expense, rest assured that W's OMB is on the case. And although even many conservatives have described the EITC as the most successful, most effective of all antipovery programs, the White House plans to hire 650 new bureaucrats and spend $100 million to whittle down its takers. The lowest-income crowd might be bilking us for up to $9 billion a year, muses the Treasury Department (in contradistinction to the General Accounting Office) -- and by all accounts it's keeping 43 up at night. That's several billion that could go into tax-free dividends.

Notwithstanding W's simplistic nostalgia, the good old days weren't better, and for many, they were anything but good. America is about to relearn that lesson the hard way.