Root supports smaller government, reduced spending, reduced entitlements, reduced bureaucracy, dramatically lower taxes, and greater personal freedom for individuals.

Yet, he added, it was hard to "find evidence that the Administration was willing to trade much public support to reduce non-defense spending or entitlements to end inflation."

Politically sacred payments could consume the entire Federal budget by 2030, according to a computer war game from a Washington panel on reducing entitlements and the deficit.

"You used to have a balance, where you had labor on one side and business on the other," said Michael D. Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group in Washington that favors reducing entitlements.

Ministers are seeking to reduce entitlements to other benefits:

The possibilities are to raise taxes, cut spending for specific Government programs or reduce entitlements.

Mr. Bush, in his budget proposal, called for changes that would reduce mandatory entitlements by $65 billion out of nearly $10 trillion that would be spent over the next five years.

And, as the deliberations of the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform have shown, changing the health-care system entails raising taxes, which is exactly what the lawmakers who say they want to lower the deficit by reducing entitlements want to avoid.