What the White House Calls a "Success"

Deficit to hit $2.3 trillion

In a report released Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revised its projection for the country's budgetary shortfalls, lowering its previous forecast for fiscal years 2004 and 2005 but raising its estimates for cumulative 10-year deficits by $281 billion.

Under current laws and policies, the projected 10-year deficit is expected to total $2.28 trillion, or 1.5 percent of the estimated 10-year combined gross domestic product (GDP), up from a March projection of $2 trillion.

The mathematicians in the White House are...CELEBRATING these numbers! Check it out.

Chad Kolton, a spokesman at the White House's Office of Management and Budget, said the lower numbers for 2004 and 2005 are evidence that the president's tax cut is working. He also said Bush's current deficit-reduction plan will erode those numbers even further.

The CBO wasted no time smacking that down.

...the CBO says that even if the economy grows faster than projected, significant long-term strains on the budget will start to intensify within the next decade as the baby-boom generation reaches retirement age.

"This is a fiscal situation in which we cannot rely on economic growth to cause deficits to disappear," CBO's Holtz-Eakin said at the agency's press conference earlier today. "Instead, the central path of the budgetary outlook will be dictated by policy choices."