Deficit grows ever larger.(THE LAST WORD)

On July 28, White House Budget Director Jim Nussle announced that the expected deficit for Fiscal Year 2009 (it begins October 1, 2008) would be a whopping $482 billion. A record for red ink, the figure shatters the previous deficit of $413 billion set in 2004.

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But as has become customary in Washington, publishing debt figures does not mean that the whole story has been told. The costs of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are not part of the projected $482 billion shortfall. Also not considered among the government's plans for next year are such items as another costly stimulus package, the enormous drain expected when Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gets around to bailing out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and near-certain declines in tax revenue resulting from the ongoing economic slowdown.

Nor does the deficit include the money the government siphons out of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to pay for other government programs, leaving the so-called trust funds filled with IOUs to cover future obligations.

Stimulus checks totaling $150 billion have already been sent to the American people. The money for this program came from one of two sources: printing or borrowing. Printing it is inflation that impacts even more drastically the already sinking value of the dollar. Borrowing it--largely from China--puts our nation in two nooses: 1) the need to pay interest and 2) giving China added influence over decision making in our nation. China, to whom we are already heavily indebted, let us recall, has never abandoned its published determination to "defeat the United States."

Budget Director Nussle, a former Iowa congressman, who originally showed promise that he would be a fiscal conservative, claimed that the projected deficit is "manageable." He insisted that if the figure were placed alongside the country's economic output, it would not look so bad. But his office also predicted that annual growth in the nation's gross domestic product would shrink to 1.6 percent, down from the 2.7 percent figure announced just last February. In other words, the recession that no one in the Bush administration wants to admit exists is deepening.

Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) commented, "If we gave Olympic medals for fiscal irresponsibility, President Bush would take the gold, the silver and the bronze, because he's got the three highest deficits ever: 2009 would be the gold, 2004 the silver, and 2008 the bronze." ...