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Cooking the Books Ari Berman

George W. Bush has a plan to cut the deficit. It's called cooking the books.

By now it's well known how Bush turned the $127 billion surplus he inherited in 2001 into a historic $413 billion deficit by 2004. It's less known that Bush's economic advisors incorrectly predicted a considerably larger $521 billion shortfall last February. Amazingly, the White House is sticking with that imaginary number--instead of the actual $413 billion--so Bush can claim he's already cut the deficit by $100 billion. If the fictional $521 billion somehow falls to $260 billion, Bush can falsely claim he's cut the deficit by half, thus fulfilling his campaign pledge.

"I've been watching this more than 30 years, and I have never seen anything quite this egregious," Stanley Collender, senior vice president for the large international consulting firm Financial Dynamics, told The New York Times. "They are cutting the deficit from a number they never believed in the beginning."

Far from shrinking the deficit, Bush's second term priorities will likely cause it to balloon. The cost of extending the tax cuts ($1 trillion), repealing the alternative minimum tax ($500 billion), paying for Medicare "reform" ($500 billion), and funding the war in Iraq (news - web sites) ($100 billion) totals $2.1 trillion. And that figure doesn't include the mbuttive costs of privatizing Social Security (news - web sites), which if pbutted by the Republican Congress could add $2 trillion more over the next decade.

Bush claims he can compensate for the reckless spending by increasing tax revenue. But, because of the huge tax cuts and corporate giveaways, federal tax revenues comprise only 16.2 percent of US GDP (news - web sites), the lowest level since the early 1950s.

In Bush's faith-based fantasy world, things can't get better until he lies about making them worse.