The president continues to insist, logic be damned, that he’s going to cut taxes, fight a war, expand Medicare, privatize Social Security, provide a $400 billion fix for the alternative minimum tax, and cut his already enormous budget deficit in half. I’ve been assuming that he’s just creating his own reality. It turns out, however, that he’s embraced the fuzziest math in history.
To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security.
To make Mr. Bush’s goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year’s actual shortfall of $413 billion.
By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.
I’ve long since run out of adjectives to describe these people. The only one I can think of is “helplessly dishonest.”
They know the higher estimate is outdated and never came to fruition, but to further deceive people, they’ll use it anyway. In other words, the only way Bush can fulfill his promises is to use numbers he knows are wrong.
As it turns out, this is actually a deception built on top of another deception.
You see, the $521 billion deficit the administration predicted last February was artificially inflated for political purposes, so when the $413 billion figure came out, it seemed like a positive step in the right direction. Was the lower estimate the result of a growing economy or improved economic management? Of course not. The Bush administration inflated its earlier estimate intentionally so that the real number would look better by comparison.
And now they want to use the higher number — which, remember, they know is wrong — to make themselves look better again, this time with deficit reduction. The result is painfully obvious: Bush is taking one lie to justify a different lie. It’s breathtaking.
If that was the whole budget plan, it’d be offensive. Unfortunately, it gets worse.
Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush’s five-year budget window.
The five-year plan, due in February, is likely to reaffirm previous predictions of a $217 billion surge in tax revenues in 2005, the biggest one-year jump on record, and almost $800 billion a year by 2009.
And what about the $2 trillion to privatize Social Security?
The budget is also expected to exclude Mr. Bush’s goal to replace Social Security in part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration officials concede that such a plan could require the government to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two.
No administration has ever been this dishonest when it comes to dealing with the public’s money. There’s just no precedent for such lunacy.