In the hit movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the father of the bride uses Windex to cure every ache and pain. It’s funny.

In the Washington soap opera, “My Big, Fat, Federal Deficit,” the president of the United States sprays tax relief on every ache and pain. It’s hilarious.

New tax-cutting doesn’t pass the laugh test now that the annual deficit (excluding Social Security) is around $300 billion. Yet George W. Bush plans mischief beyond making last year’s tax-cut binge permanent. He’s also peddling new tax breaks to turn voters’ heads.

The president has just endorsed twin tax breaks aimed at me and millions of other investors who have lost money in the stock market. At his economic talkathon in Waco, Tex., he backed a much bigger write-off for such losses, plus a new tax break for dividends. These CARE packages for capitalists don’t make any sense.

Let’s start with using stock-market losses to cut income-tax bills.

Currently, stock losses can offset up to $3,000 in ordinary income per year. In other words, the IRS gives a modest break but won’t heavily subsidize your talent for losing money. Sounds fair to me, but brokerage mogul Charles Schwab wants to make it $20,000, and Bush agrees.

This kinder, gentler treatment of Wall Street’s losers would cost the Treasury billions of dollars annually. It would contradict the tax code’s prudent bias toward investors rather than short-term traders. And by encouraging people to sell stock at a loss, it would almost certainly make bear markets worse.

Here’s another Bush-Schwab goodie for investors: a tax break for dividends. Purists have long griped that the chunk of a company’s profit paid out as dividends should not be “double-taxed” as business income and again as personal income. In principle, they are correct.

But fixing this would cost tens of billions, with most of the money going to folks with above-average incomes. That’s why the excellent tax reform of 1986 didn’t do it.

Lately, the belly flop of stocks which starred lots of high-flying companies paying no dividends has led to a new sales pitch. Fans of a pro-dividend tax break claim it would focus the stock market on fundamentals and away from speculative excess. That seems iffy. Besides, this back-to-basics shift is already happening on the cheap due to regulators, prosecutors, litigators, lawmakers and market forces.

The president’s goodies for investors and business reflect the political impulse to riddle the tax code with rewards for favored behavior. This pandering discredits his professed interest in simplifying the code one of these days.

As for that goal of a sweeping tax reform, Bush wouldn’t be the first president to slash taxes, then ignore huge deficits while touting tax reform. That was Ronald Reagan’s shtick in the 1980s.

Right now, the urgent priority on taxes is to stop future tax-cutting including waves of tax relief passed last year that will make huge deficits harder to cure. Which makes tax reform a sideshow, and new breaks a bad joke.

Douglas Pike (pikestuffaol.com) wrote this for the Philadelphia Inquirer.