Public school must be as ineffective as they all say, because my math skills aren't able to explain how $445 billion is less than $375 billion.

The Bush White House is claiming that our deficit situation "improved" this year, and I just can't seem to work that out. True, $445 billion is lower than the originally projected $512 billion, but the last time I checked we didn't measure budget improvement by how wrong we were in our original estimates. The deficit this year is larger than last year, it's merely less inflated than they originally told us it might get.

Now, it's natural for an administration to high-ball their estimates, so they can have something approaching good news when the deficit is still around at the end of the year. We know this time was no different, because the Congressional Budget Office predicted $44 billion lower than the White House's estimate, but really that's not unprecedented or evil. Such friendly reasoning is a very smart political move, especially since a January 2004 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of respondents called the deficit a top government priority, but only 1 in 6 Americans can correctly identify the difference between the federal debt and the federal deficit. I am more than willing to let them have a little fudge room to cushion the blow. I draw the line at out-right lying, though.

When releasing the report last week, Budget Director Josh Bolten said President Bush is on track to keeping his oft-mocked promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, and even other Republicans aren't buying that. For instance, the Republican-based Concord Coalition has specifically outlined that if Bush tax-cuts are made permanent the deficit will increase for at least the next 10 years, unless serious curbs to spending are implemented immediately. The Coalition is a nonpartisan group, founded and chaired by Republicans, that is dedicated to fiscal responsibility. Current CC president (and former commerce secretary) Peter G. Peterson remarked in his recent book, "This administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the most reckless deterioration of America's finances in history."

Peterson also makes what should be a very obvious point, that cutting taxes doesn't fix a damn thing unless spending is also cut; the White House's own calculations show tax cuts accounting for 29 percent of the deficits built up from 2001 to 2004, but Bush has specifically stated he has no intention to off-set those tax cuts with any reciprocal tax adjustments.

White House projections show that the deficit will fall to $331 billion in the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, and drop steadily until it is $229 billion in the 2009 fiscal year, when the next presidential term ends. However, these calculations do not include any additional spending in Iraq and Afghanistan after early next year, when current appropriations will run out. Thus the numbers are already useless, since President Bush just yesterday approved $25 billion of additional spending for U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of Pentagon funding for the fiscal year 2005.

Quite a pickle, and not a sweet one. To straighten out this mess of economics and unimaginable sums of money, I propose a simple experimental test that all Americans can try:

Weigh yourself. Now write down the absolute most you could possibly weigh next year, assuming that you consumed as many calories as physically possible each day and did not move at all. For the intervening year, eat as much as you want, avoid any nonessential physical activity, and then weigh yourself at the end of the year. Explain to all your friends that you lost weight eating whatever you want because your original estimate was higher than the actual end product, and convince them to get on board with your new miracle diet. Measure the amount of elapsed time before you are nominated as the next GOP presidential candidate.