The caps are dead. Last year Reischauer called for 'caps' that rose with inflation and population. This week Hastert said both the caps and a spending freeze are impractical, that spending should reflect some increase in the size of the economy (i.e., inflation plus real growth). Clinton's budget proposal will discard the caps (as it did last year).
The bottom line is that domestic spending is still headed south. Language is debased to the point where, when people talking about 'funding Medicare' or 'strengthening Social Security,' they mean debt pay-down with some parallel credit to the Medicare trust fund (which is solvent under current policy for 10 years or more).
You may recall Clinton in his SOTU proclaiming, let's credit the interest savings from paying down the debt to the Social Security Trust Fund. He might as well have said, let's all say abracadabra & declare the balance in the Trust Fund to have tripled.
mbs