One Saturday evening in March 1953, a period in American history when it looked as if Chinese forces might swarm across the 38th Parallel and trigger World War III, CBS aired a patriotic episode of "The Honeymooners" titled "The Income Tax." Money is short in the Kramden household, yet Ralph has managed to squirrel away $15 for a new bowling ball. Now he finds he has to use the money to pay his tax bill. Ralph grumbles a lot, but in the end he's glad. "We're living in a great country," he tells Alice, in a display of lachrymose remorse one cannot imagine seeing in today's post-"Seinfeld" sitcoms. "I didn't mean that before what I said about the income tax. Boy, we should give everything to the government. Especially this government."

How very far we've come from swooning over the income tax is the topic of "The Government We Deserve" (Urban Institute Press, 194 pages, $18.50), a new volume from Washington tax hand C. Eugene Steuerle. Mr. Steuerle's book, produced with co-authors Edward M. Gramlich, Hugh Heclo and Demetra Smith Nightingale, is something of a budget nerd's tract. Yet the numbers and details presented here do much to reveal why most of us are more likely to choke with rage than affection when the tax man comes around.

The root of the problem is simple. Forty-five years ago, Americans didn't mind paying taxes as much because they knew where their money was going. More than half the federal budget funded new and concrete goals that voters strongly supported — stopping Stalin, laying federal highways. Today, by contrast, well over half our funds flow into an ever-expanding universe of entitlements, social programs whose results we often do not see during our working lives and whose costs we did not sign on for.

"Americans can afford to provide a 26th or 27th year of Social Security annuity payment to the longer living spouse of a couple," notes the book. "But," it asks, "should we? It is practically impossible to find anyone who argues explicitly that such spending should be the nation's number one priority, even though current law now gives it that status."

More important, the share of our budget we give to such mandated expenditures is set to swell automatically. "It turns out," writes Mr. Steuerle and his co-authors, "that our government has made so many commitments—to programs with literally eternal growth rates—that it can do very little that is new without reneging on promises it has already made."

The result is an unprecedented budgetary logjam. "Our laws," Mr. Steuerle noted when stating the book's thesis before the Senate Budget Committee, "now assert to all future generations that we know better today how to spend all of the revenues they will have 10, 50, 100, or 200 years from today." With so little say in the matter, it's no wonder that Americans complain about taxes or fail to turn up at the polls.

There are several technical causes for the great logjam. One is the famous and recent "pay go" rule that makes it difficult for lawmakers to apply the burgeoning budget surplus toward tax cuts or the sort of broad Social Security privatization many Americans want. Republicans complain about this one all the time. Mr. Steuerle and his colleagues, though, focus on a more fundamental problem: our two main budget classifications.

Bearing the lucky label "entitlement"—a class that includes Social Security, Medicare and even farm supports—practically guarantees a program's growth. But if a program fall into the second-class category of "discretionary spending," it must be renewed every year. Defense, education, medical research—all these are mere "discretionary" projects. Right now, it takes the support of the House, Senate and president to slow the expansion of entitlements. Yet it takes the same coalition of forces to preserve discretionary spending.

This budgeting apartheid means that, barring any concerted action, entitlements will grow and discretionary spending will fall back. And that is exactly what has happened, our much reduced military being one of the visible casualties.

The Steuerle team would hack at the logjam with several tools. The first is writing "sunset" clauses that set an expiration date into all new legislation. They would also end the deified entitlement status, forcing Social Security and programs like it to compete with discretionary programs for money. At a very minimum, they say, "no spending program that grows faster than the economy must be allowed."

Not everyone will agree with the authors' plans for using the new fiscal leeway—they favor a lot of minor tax adjustments. No matter. The main point is to write the laws that lift the yoke of prior commitments, to profit from the unexpected fortune of Washington's surpluses before they evaporate. Lawmakers campaigning this fall will lecture us all on obstacles to change, but really their tasks are clear. As Alice says to Ralph: "the income tax—an idiot could figure that out."