"Deficits don't matter"

unless Democrats are in charge of Congress, when they do matter, after all.

That's the gist of Lori Montgomery and Nell Henderson's story in The Washington Post today:

When he takes the House rostrum next week for the State of the Union address, President Bush will list among his goals a balanced federal budget, a shift for a president who has presided over record deficits while aggressively cutting taxes. . . .

Budget experts and economists from across the political spectrum, including some who worked in the Bush White House, say that Bush is unlikely to offer real concessions toward a balanced budget in the plan he delivers to Congress next month.

Still, the administration appears to be stepping away from an economic argument that has worked well for Republicans throughout Bush's presidency: that federal deficits, though at record levels, are not especially large as a percentage of the economy and therefore offer little cause for concern, a view famously encapsulated in 2002 when Vice President Cheney told Paul H. O'Neill, then the Treasury secretary: 'Deficits don't matter.'"

Mind you, as they point out in the article, Bush wants to do it by keeping tax cuts permanent for the very wealthy and cutting programs for the very poor - and the middle class. So now,

"I get the impression they're trying to beef up his reputation for fiscal responsibility, not by doing heavy lifting and actually targeting programs like farm subsidies, but through rhetoric and projections and changes in rules and things that are easy for a president to propose," said Chris Edwards, tax director at the Cato Institute.

Typical. Deficits matter as long as Bush can make the Democrats do the painful work of fixing them - and as long as he can make sure his buddies don't suffer. After all, that's what the poor are here for, right? Suffering purifies ... or something like that.