It all magically disappeared, I guess

I had the same reaction as Digby when I watched 60 Minutes last night.

"What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous," he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

You have heard this before, from Ross Perot 15 years ago. You might have even thought the problem had been solved, when President Clinton announced, "Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit --- will be simply zero."

"Well, those days are gone. We've gone from surpluses to huge deficits and our long range situation is much worse," Walker says.

That's it? That's all we're going to hear about how this happened?

Exactly. It was, huh? First you have Bill Clinton saying the deficit is zero and then, without blinking an eye, we're told, "those days are over." And throughout the piece, the OMB official says that he must go "to the people" because the politicians from both parties don't want to hear it.

Excuse me? It was no secret what Bush's policies were going to do to the deficit. When Gore raised objections during the 2000 campaign, Bush called it "fuzzy math ('voodoo economics, anyone?')" Krugman called Bush's numbers a recipe for deficit in column after column. And that was before the disaster now known as Iraq.