Goodlings Amok

The next president will confront a far gloomier situation. The deficit, the administration's budget experts reported Monday, will be $482 billion -- a huge number that is probably a low-ball. Among other things, it assumes only $70 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The best argument the Bush administration has going for it is that this number, however mind-bogglingly large it sounds, is not alarming measured the most logical way, as a share of the economy. The 2009 deficit is projected to be just 3.3 percent of gross domestic product, well below the record 6 percent in 1983.

The difference is that President Ronald Reagan, facing such daunting deficits, changed course and undid about one-third of his earlier tax cuts. Bush, by contrast, is determined to insist, on his way out the door, that the tax cuts he once said were required by the surplus he inherited are now required by the deficit he is creating.

Delivering the bad deficit news, Jim Nussle, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, asserted that it was essential to keep the tax cuts in place to achieve balance. Huh? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the total budgetary cost of the Bush tax cuts will be $245 billion next fiscal year -- half the hole the administration has helped dig.

Monica Goodling was not the problem. She was the symptom of an administration so certain of the correctness of its worldview that it never pauses to reconsider.

marcusr@washpost.com