http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2410569
An election-year farce
Nice glossy brochure, not much fiscal responsibility
ELEVEN days after Congress at last approved a budget for the current fiscal year, which began in October, George Bush presented Congress with a $2.4 trillion budget for the next. Think of it as a campaign brochure, complete with glossy pictures of the president bringing relief to the elderly, restoring the environment and exhorting the young. As a way to unveil the three main themes of Mr Bush's re-election strategy--fighting the war on terror, protecting the "homeland" and getting the credit for a recovering economy--the brochure is a tour de force.
As an exercise in fiscal responsibility, it is a charade.
... the president promises that spending restraint, by reimposing long-term budget caps, combined with higher revenues from faster economic growth will halve the deficit by 2009. By then, the deficit will be back below its long-run average, as a proportion of GDP.
If this all looks too good to be true, it is. For once, the administration has not fiddled the books by relying on unrealistically high growth rates in the coming years; but it has relied on other fibs. For a start, the budget does not factor in the future costs of keeping soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan: even Mr Bush's own budget director says costs could be as much as $50 billion for Iraq alone in 2005. Then the usual implausible savings are found from "waste, fraud and abuse". Third, all the president's cuts are to fall on the one-fifth of the total budget that counts as domestic discretionary spending--hardly likely to happen in an election year.