The failure of the current budget exercise, like its predecessors, will not be for lack of public concern over the deficit. One recent poll shows that, as before, fully 80% say they are at least mildly disquieted by it. So, once again the government is elaborately bugging its eyes and cracking its knuckles to suggest the ''tough'' spending cuts it is preparing to tame the deficit.

But because the public, for all that it has been primed to panic over the deficit, has not given the slightest thought to what should be cut, the entire ritual is doomed. The deficit will not be addressed, as the public seems to think, by cutting cabinet ministers' expense accounts and foreign aid. But neither does it require us to jettison programs of value or cut support to those in need. Unfortunately, any spending cuts not on the public's first list will be assumed to be on the second.

The result, far from creating a constituency for serious action on the deficit, is to destroy it. So here's a free suggestion for Finance Minister Michael Wilson: Forget about the deficit. Don't even mention it. Canada does not need, as a priority, to reduce the deficit. For that matter, there is no need for spending cuts, as such.

Let me explain. I do not mean to suggest the deficit isn't a threat. It is, for all the usual reasons: the rising foreign debt, the growing interest rate burden, the prospect of eventual resort to inflation. Nor should Wilson heed those who fear a substantial cut in the deficit risks throwing the economy into recession, for three more reasons:

NO RECESSION NEAR

First, yards of press commentary to the contrary, we are nowhere near a recession, as the latest employment, housing, sales and gross domestic product numbers inconveniently point out. Second, fiscal policy does not have anything like the impact on growth, even in the short term, its unreconstructed Keynesian adherents imagine. Third, the debt-service component of the budget has become so distended that a recession, and the lower real interest rates it would bring, might actually help matters.

But the deficit itself is not the issue. It is, rather, a side effect of a far knottier problem: public spending. This may sound like the familiar conservative incantation used to ward off evil tax increases. But it is not the level of spending that is at fault, but its composition. We don't need to spend less, per se. We do need to spend smarter.

To say we must cut spending to reduce the deficit suggests the need for great sacrifices. It is to imply the spending programs we have are necessary, beneficial, and cost-efficient, but, alas, must be cast overboard to keep the fiscal ship afloat. But if that were the case, then presumably we would be willing to increase taxes instead. Only when we reached the limits of the state's ability to raise revenue would we have to look at cutting programs.

Needless to say, we are bound by neither constraint. Our spending programs are neither so lean, nor our revenue capacity so stretched, that spending cuts would be required solely by the deficit. Whatever improvement to the fiscal situation may accrue from spending less in certain areas, the deficit is now an irrelevant consideration.

The reason we should cut, say, the subsidy to Via Rail is not because we can't afford it. It's because it's a silly waste of money. Even if the budget were in surplus, it would not make sense to lavish hundreds of millions of dollars on a railroad whose passengers on any given day outnumber the work force by at best a margin of 2 to 1 (perhaps 15,000, vs 7,500). Whatever the fiscal situation, likewise, it is lunacy to be subsidizing oil megaprojects. However much we might choose to spend on unemployment insurance, it is absurd to do so in a way that encourages the activity it is supposed to insure against.

There is absolutely no need for special deficit reduction measures. What is needed is to put an end to the corruption of Canadian political culture that goes by the name of ''regional development'' or whatever other nom-de-porq the government chooses to call it; to the ongoing extortion paid to Crown corporations to keep their unions quiet; to the systematic diversion of social transfers intended for the poor to middle-class providers and beneficiaries; to the string-free transfer of billions of dollars to the provinces marked ''health'' and ''education'' that end up building bridges without roads and roads without bridges. If, in the process, the deficit is cut some, that is pure gravy.