When President Bush took office in 2001, he did so under the best of economic conditions. At least on paper the federal government was projecting record budget surpluses to continue for a decade. Granted, those projections probably assumed the economy would continue at the peak rate of the economic boom at the time, nor could it have taken into account the economic blow of the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, going from record surpluses to record deficits takes more than just ineptitude, it takes an almost preternaturally poor sense of economics, the kind of person who would give a $300 advance on a tax refund to everyone in the country and then tell them they were paying less in taxes. Now, at least according to his newest budget estimates, he's managed to turn it all around.

Forget the fact that the robust economy of the late 1990s existed in spite of Clinton's tax increases, the GOP mantra of "all taxes are bad" does not change even when overwhelming evidence says it should.

But there's more to these little shenanigans than just the standard tax-and-spend vs. lower-taxes debates that have been going on in the federal government since time immemorial. A closer examination of those budget numbers ignores a tiny, small, insigificant situation that might have an impact on federal spending; the war in Iraq. When you take that out of the equation, everybody's rich!

So unless Bush has secretly imposed his own timeline on complete withdrawal (not a single penny being spent in Iraq implies that not only will all military activity there cease, but all contracting and civilian services will also no longer require payment) from Iraq, there's some seriously "fuzzy math" going on in these projections. With some estimates placing the cost of the Iraq war upwards of $200 million each day one would hope that a cost like that would be included in projections of the future fiscal solvency of the federal fgovernment.