POLITICS is all about "Yes." Yes, we will give you Social Security. Yes, we will give you Medicare.

Yes, we will help more Americans buy homes.

Now it's yes, we will give everybody health insurance - charity care being demeaning.

And yes, we will close the "doughnut hole" in the Medicare drug benefit.

Politically, this works. American politicians have taxed and taxed, spent and spent, and been elected and elected for decades on the basis of such generosity.

It dawns on some voters only slowly that politicians don't have any money.

What they "give" people, Americans pay for - directly through personal taxes, or indirectly in a higher price for stuff made more costly by what politicians call "taxes on business."

Businesses don't have any money either; they get theirs from consumers. 

But finally, the costs of this cynical political game are evident.

The "we" in politicians' promises is us. And we're tapped out.

The Medicare "trust fund" will go broke in 2017, and the Social Security "trust fund" by 2037. Punishing taxes and benefit cuts are inevitable.

But the majority party in Washington seems unable to grasp, or perhaps to accept, that the jig is up.

Members of the U.S. Senate just passed a $447 billion spending bill that raises federal agencies' expenditures by $48 billion - up 12 percent from this fiscal year.

It's full of "gifts" - about 5,000 "earmarks" worth nearly $3.9 billion - that are now raining down on members' districts.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, "That increase - when inflation is negligible - is in addition to the $311 billion in stimulus already authorized or out the door for these programs.

"Adding this new stash means that federal agencies will have received a nearly 70 percent increase in the last two years."

This after federal policies helped cause a housing bust, which helped cause a bank meltdown, which caused the American economy to pancake into recession.

Americans have lost $12 trillion in household net worth.

And what the Democratic majority in Congress proposes to spend is all borrowed money.

The national debt now stands at more than $12 trillion.

The Treasury department has told the administration that Congress must raise the debt ceiling, which it raised in February to $12.1 trillion, by another $1.8 trillion by Dec. 31 to finance government operations through the 2010 election.

Yet there was President Obama, with a straight face, telling the American people that if Congress does not pass another $1 trillion or $2 trillion health care bill, the United States government will go bankrupt.

The costs of Medicare and Medicaid are on an "unsustainable" trajectory," Obama told Charles Gibson of ABC News solemnly, and if no action is taken to bring them down, "the federal government will go bankrupt."

This as Democrats in the Senate assure us we must also swallow a gargantuan bill to make energy more expensive.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Copenhagen announcing that the United States stands ready to join other rich countries in raising $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations cope with global warming.

Are we now.

With what?

Money from the Chinese?

Which will have to be repaid by grandchildren already staggering under the burden of paying for Social Security and Medicare?

Liberal Democrats are out of touch with reality. What is coming out of Washington is dangerously delusional.

Members of Congress have no  business passing a trillion-dollar health care bill or a trillion-dollar energy bill.

The American people must stay in touch with reality and make a sharp course correction at the ballot box.

Obama was elected on the meaningless slogan of "Change we can believe in."

Wild federal spending isn't change we can believe in.

It's nonsense that needs to be stopped.

Maurice is editorial page editor of the Daily Mail. She may be reached at 348-4802 or ha...@dailymail.com.