Is it the government, which never fails to warn of the grave threat to the province's well-being posed by the $9-billion deficit and $97-billion debt, even as it is merrily cutting personal income taxes by 30 per cent? Or is it the opposition parties, who never gave a fig about the deficit until they were alerted to the possibility that, should the Tory plan be enacted, somebody, somewhere might pay less in taxes?

Certainly the Tories have been doing all the running in the media stakes. It has been widely noted that the tax cut would cost the government $20-billion in forgone revenues over the next five years - almost exactly the amount by which the provincial debt would grow in the same period. The implication is clear: The government is borrowing all of the money it is handing back to taxpayers. Thoughtful observers everywhere are appalled.

But wait a minute - wasn't that tax cut also supposed to have been snatched from the mouths of welfare mothers? Didn't we read that, were it not for the Tory tax cut, there would be more money to spend on welfare, or children with learning disabilities - or, come to that, richer severance packages for laid-off government workers? These are all worthy causes. But you can't spend the same tax cut twice. Either the revenue should go to deficit reduction, as the born-again fiscal conservatives in the opposition seem to suggest. Or it can be put to more traditional uses: more spending. But not both.

Well now. Are the Liberals and NDP proposing that the deficit should be eliminated faster than the five-year schedule the Tories have proposed? Of course not. Had the Tories merely cut $6-billion or $8-billion out of spending, and skipped the tax cut, they would have put us on track to a balanced budget in two or three years. And the opposition parties would be wailing over the terrible toll on the economy if it were drained of so much fiscal "stimulus" at one go.

The truth is there isn't a whole lot of difference any more between the three parties on the deficit. They're all gradualists. All three vow to balance the budget, and on more or less the same timetable: four to five years. The only thing they disagree on is the mix of spending cuts and tax cuts they would use to get there. It is, after all, the difference between the amount you cut spending and the amount you cut taxes that determines the pace of deficit reduction, not the absolute size of either.

As far as the impact on the deficit is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the cuts are $6-billion and $4-billion, respectively, as the Tories promised in the election, or $4-billion and $2-billion, as the Liberals preferred, or $2-billion and zero, as in the NDP program. If the government needs to borrow money, it can no more be put down to how much it cut taxes than to how much it failed to cut spending. It borrows to make up the difference between the two.

Nor has there been any development since to alter this basic arithmetic: Despite the best efforts of The Toronto Star to puff up the revenue loss from the tax cut, even the Liberals project it will cost a maximum of $4.7-billion three years out. And while the NDP's pre-election spending binge may force the Tories to cut spending by more than they had planned - it will take cuts of close to $8- billion, rather than $6- billion, to reach their original target of $41-billion in program spending - it's still the case that with any kind of economic growth at all, the resulting rise in revenues will get you the other $6-billion needed to balance the budget.

As badly as the Ontario fiscal situation may have deteriorated, it is nowhere near as far gone as the federal government. So gradualism is still defensible. So long as the government begins now and makes steady progress, it really doesn't matter whether it balances the budget in four, five or six years.

Indeed, if it's a choice between a government that balances the budget but leaves both spending and taxes at perilously high levels, or a government that merely reduces the deficit from $9-billion to $1-billion, but cuts spending and taxes back to somewhere near their historic norms, it's clear which one the credit raters would prefer.

The difference between born-again fiscal conservatives and the real thing is that the latter realize that the deficit, as such, is not the problem. Nor, for that matter, are high taxes. Both are rather symptoms of a common disease: excess spending.