Budgets are, needless to say, political speeches, and best approached in the same spirit. While much information on the future direction of fiscal policy is contained in the 389 pages of Tuesday's federal budget - - a three-year, $25-billion increase in spending springs to mind -- much more is conveyed by what was not included.

There are, for example, no tax increases of any kind. That may seem a small and obvious thing, in this age of surplus, but for decades that was not the case. "Tax and spend" used to mean not just a failure to bring in much in the way of additional tax cuts, but a policy of steadily rising taxes, especially on higher incomes -- to finance the expansion of the welfare state, and to bring about a progressively more equal distribution of income. Outside of the NDP, that is not on anyone's agenda any more. Even a tax increase for health care, as proposed in the Kirby report, was a non-starter.

Neither does this budget contain much in the way of tax preferences for particular industries judged to be of special importance. The one example I can find is an increase in the film and video production services tax credit. Yet until very recently, these were the typical stuff of budgets, the means by which generations of finance ministers sculpted the economy to their designs -- one reason why the tradition of budget secrecy once had some validity. But neither tax preferences nor budget secrecy are much in vogue today.

Double-digit increases in spending, on the other hand, have a distinctly Seventies whiff about them. But look at what that money was spent on -- and what it was not spent on. In the 1970s and 1980s, Big Government meant expensive forays into the aerospace and oil industries. It meant escalating subsidies to a multiplying number of Crown corporations: Air Canada, Canadian National, Canada Post, the CBC, and so on. The government has withdrawn from most of these sectors now. And those that remain got nothing in this budget. (Well, next to nothing: the Business Development Bank of Canada, of all people, was given $190-million "to expand venture capital." The Shawinigan Hoteliers Fund?)

For all the money that was thrown about on Tuesday, in other words, and all the talk of a return to government activism -- the Chretien legacy and all that -- it is within the confines of a much more modest conception of the state's role. The notion, to take another example, that government should use fiscal policy to "stimulate" the economy, still capable of raising a vestigial jerk of the knee as late as the last budget, is all but extinct: Even the people who think they believe in it would blanch at running a deficit to finance it, without which the idea lacks even internal coherence. The budget boasts of Canada having posted the fastest economic growth of any G7 country over the last five years - - a period of steadily mounting surpluses. By the Liberals' own previous reasoning, this should have been impossible. Remember?

Cutting the deficit to zero, candidate Jean Chretien warned in 1993, would lead to "revolution," or possibly civil war.

For the most part, rather, the budget reflects a vision of government that is almost purely redistributive. Even here, times have changed.

Budgets in years past might have unveiled some vast new program involving the government as direct provider of social benefits.

Nowadays, the idea is to put money in the hands of individuals, and let them purchase these services for themselves, as in the National Child Benefit or the Canada Graduate Scholarships, or for governments to purchase services on their behalf, the likely destination for most of the funds provided to the provinces for health-care reform.

That's not to say that the trend is all in one direction. The return of government to the construction of "affordable housing" -- rather than providing the poor with shelter allowances -- is a worrisome sign, in light of the demonstrable failings of similar programs in the past. The billions of dollars to be ploughed into municipal infrastructure is equally likely to be misspent: In most cases, from roads to transit, these would be better financed from user charges. And as long as we're talking of what's not in the budget, we might also talk about the things that weren't included, but should have been: namely, cuts in subsidies to business, or to businesses by another name, like farmers or the cultural industries. Regional development, technology partnerships and now sustainable development: Whatever the euphemism, corporate welfare is still the means, and Liberal empire-building still the objective.

That's perhaps what's most striking about the budget: how inert it is, neither expanding the government's role nor contracting it, but simply spending a lot more on the same things. The same, only more so. Not a very inspiring slogan, as legacies go, but wholly in keeping with the legator.