Rhetoric versus fiscal reality once again – from the Washington Post:

A senior administration official told reporters that Bush’s budget — to be announced Feb. 7 — will show the government on track to cut the deficit in half from the White House’s initial deficit projection for 2004.

But the CBO projections cast significant doubt on that claim. In total, the CBO projected that the government will amass an additional $855 billion in debt between 2006 and 2015, but Holtz-Eakin cautioned that the figure almost certainly understates the problem. The total assumes no additional money will be spent in Iraq or Afghanistan over the next decade. Perhaps more important, the CBO, by law, must assume Bush’s first-term tax cuts will expire after 2010, sending the government’s balance sheet from a $189 billion deficit that year to a $71 billion surplus in 2012.

The CBO forecast also excludes the cost of Bush’s promised restructuring of Social Security, which could add an additional $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next decade.

Even with those favorable omissions, the CBO projected that Bush will miss his goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 from last year’s level. The 2009 deficit, excluding war and Social Security costs, is expected to drop to $207 billion, just over half of last year’s record $412 billion level, the forecast said.

So with no spending on Iraq, Afghanistan or Social Security (as well as no fix of the alternative minimum tax, I assume), the deficit still isn’t cut in half by 2009. But we’re on track!

PS There’s a great graph in the New York Times print version today illustrating how much different our long-term fiscal trajectory looks in the CBO numbers when you add in costs for Iraq, Afghanistan and making the tax cuts permanent. But it’s not online for some reason. I’ll try to scan it in later.

Update 1/26: It’s online! (Kevin Drum has it up.) Here’s the graphic:

By contrast, here’s what the Wall Street Journal is feeding its readers (subscription required – via Paul Krugman on Josh Marshall’s site):

As Krugman points out, the Journal fails to disclose that its chart is based on two implausible assumptions that CBO is required to make — first, that Bush’s tax cuts expire in 2010 and second, that nothing is done to reform the alternative minimum tax (though the editors acknowledge that the chart also excludes costs for Iraq and Afghanistan). If the tax cuts are made permanent and the AMT is fixed, things get a whole lot worse, as in the previous graph. Don’t trust the Journal op-ed page!