Fuzzy Math, Courtesy of the White House

Mr. Bush and his friends are having trouble coming up with numbers that will fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009. So, somebody came up with the brilliant idea of using a fake number to start with instead of the real number.

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.

Not only that, they are going to omit a few big ticket items like the wars in Iraq and Afganistan and the two-trillion that his Social Security plan will cost over the next ten years or so. And their tax-revenue estimating is a bit ambitious.

But White House budget planners are not stopping there. 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.

These guys are brilliant! I hope all the other Americans out there appreciate being lied to as much as I do.