There’s been a lot of whoop-dee-doo in the news today about the budget deficit not being as bad as predicted. Andrew Taylor writes for the Associated Press:

President Bush touted new deficit figures Tuesday showing considerable improvement upon earlier administration predictions, saying it shows the wisdom of his tax cuts.

Bush himself announced the figures — a task that for the most part has been left to lower-ranking administration officials in the past. The new figures show the deficit for the budget year ending Sept. 30 will be $296 billion — much better than the $423 billion that Bush predicted in February and a slight improvement over 2005.

This is from President Bush’s announcement:

Here are some hard numbers: Our original projection for this year’s budget deficit was $423 billion. That was a projection. That’s what we thought was going to happen. That’s what we sent up to the Congress, here’s what we think. Today’s report from OMB tells us that this year’s deficit will actually come in at about $296 billion. (Applause.)

That’s what happens when you implement pro-growth economic policies. We faced difficult economic times. We cut the taxes on the American people because we strongly believe that the American people should lead us out of recession. Our small businesses flourished, people invested, tax revenue is up, and we’re way ahead of cutting the deficit — federal deficit in half by 2009.

As a matter of fact, we’re a year ahead of fulfilling a pledge that I told the Congress and the American people. I said to the American people, give this plan a chance to work. We worked with Congress to implement this plan. I said, we can cut the federal deficit in half by 2008 — or 2009. We’re now a full year ahead of schedule. Our policies are working, and I thank the members of Congress for standing with us.

Bush and his budget team are slackers. If they’d projected a $600 million deficit, today that deficit would be cut in half already.

Joel Havemann writes in today’s Los Angeles Times:

This will be the third year in a row that the administration put forth relatively gloomy deficit forecasts early on, only to announce months later that things had turned out better than expected. To some skeptics, it’s beginning to look like an economic version of the old “expectations” game. …

… Early in 2004, it projected a deficit of $521 billion for the fiscal year that was then 4 months old. It used that figure as the benchmark for its promise to cut the deficit in half within five years. That made its task easier: The high estimate, when reduced by reality, gave the administration a head start on its pledge.

See? I don’t know why the President is messing around with these wimpy little incremental steps.

Brad DeLong writes,

[The] Bush forecast of six months ago was deliberately high balled by $60 billion or so—precisely so that the administration could claim now that recent news on the deficit has been very good. As nonpartisan budget analyst Stan Collender wrote half a year ago, “The Bush administration held a conference call … to say that the 2006 deficit would be $400 billion or more … [This administration] has a well-established history of overstating the deficit early in the year and then taking credit when it turns out to be lower than projected, even if it has done nothing to make that happen.”

Paul Krugman has written extensively about the Bush Administration creative number crunching. For example, he wrote in July 2003:

The numbers tell the tale. In its first budget, released in April 2001, the administration projected a budget surplus of $334 billion for this year. More tellingly, in its second budget, released in February 2002 — that is, after the administration knew about the recession and Sept. 11 — it projected a deficit of only $80 billion this year, and an almost balanced budget next year. Just six months ago, it was projecting deficits of about $300 billion this year and next.

There’s no mystery about why the administration’s budget projections have borne so little resemblance to reality: realistic budget numbers would have undermined the case for tax cuts. So budget analysts were pressured to high-ball estimates of future revenues and low-ball estimates of future expenditures. Any resemblance to the way the threat from Iraq was exaggerated is no coincidence at all.

And just as some people argue that the war was justified even though it was sold on false pretenses, some say that the biggest budget deficit in history is justified even though the administration got us here with cooked numbers.

In another departure from reality, today the President credited his 2001 tax cuts for today’s budget reduction. To which Professor DeLong says,

This afternoon, the Bush administration will claim that because of its supply-side policies, the 2006 budget deficit will be about $300 billion, much lower than the $423 billion the Bush administration forecast last February. It will claim that its 2003 tax cuts have more than paid for themselves. It will claim that the tax cuts have accelerated economic growth enough to produce a net gain in revenue.

Does it think that reporters won’t ask the obvious questions—like, didn’t you guys say back in February that your forecasts already included the effects of the 2003 tax cuts on revenue? Do you really think your audience is too stupid to realize that revisions in the forecast since February come from things that have happened since February and not from things that happened three years ago? Didn’t Republicans like Dick Cheney claim that the 2001 tax cut wouldn’t create a deficit, that the 1993 tax increase wouldn’t reduce the deficit and that the 1981 tax cut wouldn’t increase the deficit? Shouldn’t people who are zero for 3 be less sure of themselves?

Finally, Professor DeLong provides another clue why righties cannot govern:

How did the Republican Party ever get into the business of claiming that tax cuts in America today don’t just expand the economy enough to make back some of the revenue lost, but expand it enough to make back all? It’s not because any group of reality-based Republican economists believed it. In his 1998 book “Principles of Economics,” Mankiw derided Ronald Reagan’s early-’80s supply-side experiment as “fad economics” peddled by “snake oil salesm[e]n … trying to sell a miracle cure.” It’s because a Republican journal of ideas called the Public Interest thought it would be a politically convenient claim to make. As its editor Irving Kristol later explained, his “own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” arose because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

OK, so let’s see if I can get this straight — Kristol wanted to create a conservative majority, and to achieve this he and other movement righties pushed the not conservative (in any traditional sense of the word) notion that deficits don’t matter. In other words, the plan was to convert people to conservatism by selling them on an unconservative policy. I assume they think this conservative majority would be good for America, even if they have to wreck the economy to create the majority.

And they call us moonbats.