For an issue that no one cares about, the deficit has put in rather a good showing in the public hysteria sweepstakes of late. An Angus Reid poll registers 57% of those surveyed in favor of moderate, sensible reductions in the deficit over several years. Another 32% would consider any measure, no matter how desperate.

That indeed is the problem. Public complacency over the deficit has given way to crackpot suggestions for its reduction. A raft of loopy ideas, from the merely unworkable to the wholly unthinkable, has floated into popular discussion of the issue, under cover of a sudden fog of public anxiety.

But a deficit reduction lottery? That's the idea rattling about in junior Finance minister John McDermid's head. It's a regressive, inefficient way to raise money that preys most heavily on the poor. I'm not so paternalistic as to say private agencies shouldn't be allowed to sell lottery tickets if they want, but I don't want my government in the business.

That's only the most certifiably crazy scheme for raising revenues. Most are more conventionally silly. The same Reid poll, for example, reports upward of 80% of those surveyed think the deficit should be cut by raising taxes on that old vaudeville double act, corporations and the wealthy.

Soaking the rich at least has the virtue of ineffectiveness. Even assuming the rich pay their taxes, there simply aren't enough rich people in Canada, as Michael Wilson once said, to make any significant contribution to revenue. But raising taxes on corporations is worse than meaningless: it's a sham. As Lord Acton said, ''corporate bodies have no souls.'' Nor do they pay any taxes.

BURDEN SHIFTED

The burden is always shifted to the shareholders, in lower dividends, or to the workforce, in lower wages, or to consumers, in higher prices. Since it is impossible to know beforehand how the burden will divide, the tax may well fall on those least able to pay. If Wilson wants to raise taxes, he'd do far better to follow my advice, and sock it to the middle class. That alternative, strangely, does not appear on Reid's poll.

The more creatively absurd or plainly unjust ideas for deficit reduction are found on the expenditures side. First among these is the new sacred trust, an attack on universality. People who like to think themselves fiscal realists insist the government must rigorously target social programs, extending payments only to those most in need, and withdrawing support from the better off.

But the more assiduous you are in withdrawing funds as the income of the recipient rises, the higher the implicit tax rate he faces. That's the real problem with the present system: not that it is not targeted sharply enough, but that in some ways it is targeted too sharply, locking many people out of a job and onto welfare.

The best contribution social spending can make to deficit reduction is to free people from this ''poverty trap.'' And the easiest way to do that is to maintain universality, and use the tax system to claw back payments from those less in need.

Less defensible still are suggestions that the government should renew attempts to de-index transfer payments from inflation, after the debacle over old age pensions. This is the most gutless, undemocratic approach to budget control one can imagine, and the elderly were right to kick the government in the shins for trying it.

This is not because their claim on the public purse should not be reduced. The elderly are, as a group, better off than the rest of us. But if the government wants to cut spending, it must do so by persuading Parliament of its necessity, not by letting inflation do its dirty work for it.

The C. D. Howe Institute, last, thinks the government can shave $3 billion a year from the deficit through privatization. Privatization has many virtues, but deficit reduction isn't one of them. Any gains it offers are either accounting fiction, the difference between the sale price and some notional book value assigned the assets, or speculative, based on the hope that a Crown corporation will require less in subsidies in private hands. The proceeds from the sale itself cannot properly be counted against the deficit.

Any government that could summon the nerve to privatize a money-losing Crown corporation could as well insist that it pay its own way in the public sector. That, in the end, is what deficit reduction will ultimately depend upon: not gimmicky revenue schemes or phony expenditure cuts, but political will.