Spurious budget numbers

“To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half … 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” NYTimes.

They’re also ignoring:

• the cost of the war
• plans to privatize Social Security
• repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax

And were we informed of this during the election campaign? In the commercial world, this is called “bait and switch”.