POLITICS

Sex, Lies and Bush Tapes
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF (New York Times)

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.

I'm sorry if I sound screechy. But my first beat at this newspaper, in 1984, was covering the Latin American debt crisis. Later I lived in Japan as its economy went from a global juggernaut to a global laughingstock. After you've seen how quickly national leaders can bungle national economies, and how difficult it is to put Humpty Dumpty together again, you have less patience for high-risk intellectual dishonesty like Mr. Bush's fiscal policy. Dishonesty is a strong word. But the new book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill discloses that Mr. Bush's 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress about his budget contained a falsehood — about paying off all possible American debt — even after Mr. O'Neill pointed it out.

"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 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.

All in all, as I look at the economy, I miss President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton had egregious personal failings, and I deplored what I felt was his dishonesty. But as a steward of the economy, he combined fiscal conservatism with a willingness to stand against protectionism. No leader today, Democrat or Republican, is so forthright about the economy, and it's sad to see Democrats retreating from free trade.

Compared with Mr. Bush, John Kerry and most other Democratic presidential candidates are paragons of responsibility — but only compared with Mr. Bush. The reality is that promises by Democrats like Mr. Kerry to start new health care programs, keep some of the tax cuts and restore black ink are nonsense. But it's less nonsense to say 2 + 2 = 5 (Mr. Kerry) than to say 2 + 2 = 22 (Mr. Bush). Mr. Clinton lied about sex, and he was sleazy in other respects as well, but he was willing to tell America the unpleasant truth about trade and about budgets. I wish Mr. Bush and his Democratic challengers would be half as honest with the American public as Mr. Clinton was.