The Economist magazine, in a column wryly titled “Pangloss Revisited”, notes that “The average deficit over the next decade in now expect to be 5.1% of GDP, compared with an average of 4% in the original budget”, and that even in the last year of the forecast, 2019, the budget deficit is supposed to be 5% of GDP! Wow!

As weird as that is, it gets weirder later in the article when Peter Orzag of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), whom the article called “Mr. Obama’s top budget man”, has “tried to put a positive spin on the situation. By 2019, he argued on his blog, America’s primary deficit (the difference between revenue and spending excluding interest payments) would be only 0.6% of GDP.”

Excluding interest payments? Hahaha! Why in the hell would you exclude interest payments? Hahaha! You shake your head in amazement that this is the