Based on faulty assumptions and callous cutbacks, the president's budget simply doesn't add up. It is aprescription for deficits reminiscent of the 1980s.

President Bush's first budget is an interesting work of political and economic fiction. To make the numbers add up, it makes economic assumptions (such as the projection that a prescription drug benefit for the elderly and disabled would cost only $153-billion over the next decade) that could come true only in a magical kingdom far, far away from modern-day Washington. It also creates a political never-neverland where members of Congress willingly accept painful cuts in agriculture subsidies, transportation funds, environmental protection, law enforcement and other programs dear to their constituents.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle says the Bush budget "wasn't just dead on arrival -- it was dead before arrival." If so, the cause of death is clear: This budget was starved to death by the $1.6-trillion tax cut to which the president remains committed. Without such a massive tax cut, the Bush budget could still attain large surpluses without having to cut actual funding -- not just the rate of growth or inflation-adjusted dollars -- in 10 of the 25 major federal agencies in the 2002 budget.

The Bush budget is generous in some areas. The federal government's modest support for education would increase by 11.5 percent. The National Institutes of Health would receive a 13 percent boost. Housing programs for low-income homeowners and renters would be expanded. Overall, however, this is a crimped budget that will assuredly be enlarged by Congress. The White House has good reason to try to cut back on sweetheart agricultural subsidies, pork-barrel public works projects and some other areas of perennial congressional profligacy. In many other respects, though -- such as cutting funding for pediatric training, urban police units, energy conservation, Boys & Girls Clubs in high-crime areas and many other worthy programs -- the budget is almost inexplicably callous.

All proposed budgets play some funny games with numbers, but this one is more dishonest than most. For example, the $310-billion in proposed military spending does not take into account the top-to-bottom Pentagon review being undertaken by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The results of that process are certain to create political pressure for billions in additional spending for upgraded weaponry, facilities and benefits. The budget also does not account for the huge up-front costs of the president's plan to privatize part of Social Security.

More broadly, the Bush budget isn't honest about its short-term and long-term surplus projections. On top of the additional defense spending to come, the president knows that Congress will restore billions of dollars in funding for domestic programs short-changed in his proposal. And his long-term projections call for ever-tighter annual limits on discretionary spending that congressional Republicans and Democrats alike will never accept. Only by adhering to such political fictions can the president project a $231-billion surplus for the coming year, and trillions in surpluses over the coming decade.

The political and economic truth is that the president's $1.6-trillion tax cut, tilted toward the very rich, coupled with a final spending plan more realistic than the document offered by the White House, risks returning the country to the kinds of deficits not seen since Bush's father was president. The new Bush budget resorts to several fictions to avoid confronting that risk, but the reality of the bottom line can't be ignored indefinitely.

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