Bush’s Nonwar Budget: Hide and Sneak. Jonthan Chait:

As he went about crafting last year’s budget, President Bush had a problem. He wanted a big tax cut more than anything else, but polls showed the public was more interested in social spending. So Bush set out to obscure the trade-off between these objectives. His method? Hide his priorities behind the supposedly huge budget surplus. “We have increased our budget at a responsible four percent, we have funded our priorities, we have paid down all the available debt, we have prepared for contingencies–and we still have money left over,” he announced in his 2001 budget speech to Congress.

As he goes about promoting this year’s budget, released on Monday, Bush still has the same problem: He remains wedded to tax cuts uber alles, and, while his personal ratings remain stratospheric, poll after poll shows (by a wide margin) that the public would rather scale back the tax cut than run a deficit. And, since the surplus has evaporated, he can no longer hide behind the fiction of limitless resources. Fortunately for him, he has two new concealments: a war and a Democratic Congress. This year’s plan is to hide behind both. The New Republic