On Thursday, the Senate made a show of cutting Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies and several other programs to save $36 billion. There are real cuts in the legislation and other moves that will hurt the sick, elderly and students.

But it’s mostly just a sham. The Senate’s tough love isn’t really about reducing the federal budget. It’s about paying for a new round of tax cuts. At the same time that the Senate was cutting back important programs, the House was debating whether to take the cuts further, into the $54 billion neighborhood. But both chambers were also talking about $70 billion in new tax cuts.

The federal budget is distended. Pressure from Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, two previous rounds of tax cuts and the new Medicare prescription drug benefit have heaped debt upon mountains of debt. Even if the cuts were allowed to stand on their own, they’d barely scratch the surface. But they don’t even offset the new tax-cut proposal. The cuts are about paying for part of the tax cuts on the back of the old, the sick and the young.

The Senate spending bill also books revenue from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted against the entire package. Mainers should be grateful for their work. But their efforts fell short and the spending bill passed, 52-47.

If Congress were really interested in reducing the deficit, it could do a lot more good by postponing – or even eliminating – the Medicare prescription plan. That would book real savings. If put off for two years, the federal government could save more than $80 billion. If repealed, the savings would be between $850 and $1.2 trillion between now and 2015. Seniors don’t like it or understand it anyway.

Given the political landscape and growing pressure on the federal government to reduce its spending ways, we might be able to accept painful budget cuts that bring the country back toward fiscal responsibility. But what’s going on in Congress right now isn’t about responsibility. It’s about starving the government of the revenue it needs to provide basic services.