The federal and state-local tax systems are theoretically separate. But they're bound together by thousands of threads, from federal road and rail subsidies to joint ventures such as Medicaid to state income taxes tied directly to the federal schedule.

So a fiscally sick Uncle Sam dooms states and localities to hard times. Already the states, denied the luxury of deficit spending, face grave fiscal crises. They've cut tens of billions from their budgets for the year starting July 1, and still have $25 billion in cuts to go. For next year their prospective shortfall is $85 billion to $90 billion -- nearly 10 percent of their total operating budget figures.

In the face of that extreme, the federal government ought to be helping out with emergency aid. Is it? No. Instead, it wants to dump, counting the earlier Bush tax cuts, $1 trillion-plus in tax benefits into the laps of wealthy individuals whom it claims will use the cash to invest and stimulate the economy.

Can such a formula work? Not if you ask a group of such authorities as former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, former Treasury Secretaries Peter Peterson and Robert Rubin, former Sens. Bob Kerrey, Sam Nunn and Warren Rudman. In a joint op-ed article (Outlook, April 10), they warned the Bush tax cuts would lead to cumulative 10-year deficits ranging from $4.2 trillion to $6.7 trillion, eventually slowing the economy, raising interest rates to pay off national debt, lowering the national savings that can be devoted to productive investments.

The long-term result, clearly, may be a fiscally paralyzed national government, unable to rise to new and unforeseen challenges.

And this wild throw of the fiscal dice is being made less than a decade before a tsunami of baby boomers start to retire (from 2011 on), presenting gargantuan demands for increased Social Security and Medicare outlays.