Bush Lies in the State of the Union...Surprise Surprise

Today I was reading through the Sunday Edition of the New York Times and I came across a very interesting article called the Budget Illusion.

Now it is no surprise that President Bush lied in the State of the Union, as he has done so about Iraq, the War on Terror and Social Security among others but I just wanted to bring to light this little fib to add to his list of aspersions.

In this most recent State of the Union, Bushy said that we had cut the budget deficit in half from 2004-2006. This is a lie. The deficit fell from $412 billion to$248 billion and if you measure it as a percentage of the economy he was off by an amount equal to about $15 billion. (Thank you New York Times for the figures)

Let me quote for you a little bit more of the rest of the article:

"Mr. Bush greatly compounded his otherwise modest exaggeration by taking credit for the reduction, when the deficit really fell despite his policies, not because of them...The drop in deficit over the past few years was due largely to the cyclical recovery from the earlier recession, and to a boost in revenue when temporary business tax cuts expired after 2004. Mr. Bush, meanwhile, has pursued a single-minded strategy of spending more while slashing taxes. That is the opposite of deficit reduction; it has made the budget hole deeper than it would have been. Still, Mr. Bush wants you to believe that tax cuts caused the economic recovery, and thus the budget improvement.

That was the speech, and then there is reality, which came knocking within days when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its annual 10-year budget outlook. The outlook is for a cumulative deficit of $2.9 trillion to $3.4 trillion - about $300 billion a year - if, as Mr. Bush wishes, the tax cuts are extended beyond their scheduled expiration in 2010 and tax relief continues for Americans wrongly afflicted by the alternative minimum tax. In arriving at its estimate, the budget agency also assumed that costs for the war in Iraq would start going down next year, an assumption that, if proved wrong, would result in even higher deficits."

Now you may be saying, it's $15 billion dollars, what's the big deal? The big deal is this is our President, and this is not his first little lie. If he is willing to lie about this among other things, what else is he willing to lie about.