i have this vision of bush sitting in a corner actually "hatching" this shit uga uga!!
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=279773ECONOMY – FISCAL SELF-MISUNDERESTIMATION:
The White House has hatched a host of cosmetic changes and misleading exemptions to give the nation's fiscal outlook a phony facelift when the five-year budget plan is presented in February. First, to help President Bush fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, "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," the New York Times reports. That way, "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." In addition, "
dministration officials are…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." Also left out of the budget plan is the president's Social Security privatization plan, which experts say may cost as much as $2 trillion.