Achieving Results, Addressing the Challenges Ahead Cooking the Books

In a fit of bean-counting hubris worthy of Arthur Andersen (not to mention the Soviet Gosplan), the White House Office of Management and Budget has decided to use its own outdated deficit predictions from February 2004 (none of which came true) in order to take credit for "reducing the shortfall" by about $100 billion. On top of that, they're predicting increased tax revenues (from where?), ignoring the "supplemental appropriations" which fund the Iraq war, and factoring out the devastation that Social Security "reform" would wreak on the budget. The New York Times is reporting on it today, and you can hear the alarm bells ringing in the source quotes:

Many analysts are dubious about the long-term plan. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that deficits will remain well above $300 billion if Mr. Bush's tax cuts are made permanent and if Iraq war costs taper off gradually. On Wall Street, analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that budget deficits will total about $5 trillion over the next 10 years.

"I've been watching this more than 30 years, and I have never seen anything quite this egregious," said Stanley Collender, a longtime author on budget issues and a senior vice president at Financial Dynamics, a communications firm in Washington.

"They are cutting the deficit from a number they never believed in the beginning," Mr. Collender said, referring to the decision to measure progress against the unrealized $521 billion deficit projection. "What if they had forecast that the deficit would be $800 billion last year? Would they take credit for having cut it by half?"

It's nothing new for the OMB to dispense such lily-blossoms wrapped in a tissue of lies, but here it seems to have breached a zone of hypocrisy and deceit. If Bush smirks his way through his cash-incinerating inauguration, knowing that his administration just keeps making stuff up and getting away with it (while stoked by his preposterous beatification as an "American revolutionary"), we're in for a frightening future if we don't start writing letters to our local papers and Congress. I would also advocate loopholing the hell out of your taxes, just to foil those bizarro-world revenue expectations, but only wealthy bastards can make any dent on that front (and they ain't reading this blog) (plus it's almost impossible to loophole the payroll tax, which will likely remain the same even despite any Social Security reform...)