Sex, Lies and Bush on Tape
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Using this week's White House budget methodology, I can project that if you just keep reading this column, your assets will increase by $28,581 and you will lose 12.42 pounds. And this column is projected to end after just one paragraph.

Well, so much for White House projections.

If we're serious about confronting threats to our way of life, we don't have to hunt them in the caves of eastern Afghanistan. We can find a serious threat in the West Wing of the White House as the Bush administration charts its fiscal policy.

President Bush's budget policies have mortgaged America, yet instead of repairing the damage, he is intensifying the harm by trying to make his tax cuts permanent. And this week he presented a budget that is so dazzlingly deceitful it does not even attempt to include the bills for our presence in Iraq.

Conservatives have traditionally been the conscience of America's checkbook (and, to their credit, many now are screaming). If Mr. Bush were a genuine conservative, he might cut taxes, but he would cut spending to match. If he were an honest liberal, he might increase spending, and taxes as well. Instead, the president is inviting us out for a wild night on the town and leaving us — and our children — with the bill.

…"That night, Bush stood before the nation . . .," recounts the book, "The Price of Loyalty," "and said something that knowledgeable people in the U.S. government knew to be false." I've excerpted that speech at www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds (look for Posting No. 266), and it makes painful reading.

In the 2000 campaign, I covered Mr. Bush a bit, so this week I dug out tapes of his speeches. On those tapes, he claims that he will leave the great bulk of the surplus intact: "My plan is to take a portion of the projected surplus, a little over $1 trillion of the $4 trillion surplus, and give it to the people who pay the bills."

The reality is that under Mr. Bush, surpluses have completely vanished. Granted, he had help from a bad economy. But spending has increased more rapidly than under any president since Lyndon Johnson, and Mr. Bush refuses to pay for it. I've seen that story before — in Argentina.

Now the I.M.F. has warned that the U.S. budget and trade deficits are a threat to the global economy.

A new study from the Brookings Institution, "Restoring Fiscal Sanity," estimates that by 2014 the average family's income will be $1,800 lower because of slower economic growth caused by these budget deficits. A family with a 30-year $250,000 mortgage will be paying $2,000 more per year in interest costs alone.