American Notes the Deficit

What do you call a $100 billion mistake? Inexcusable? Grotesque? If you are a Washington bureaucrat, you call it a "technical re-estimate." That was the modest verbiage employed by the Office of Management and Budget last week when, during its mid-year review, the agency acknowledged that estimates of tax revenues for the next five years were $130 billion too high. The result: even higher budget deficits.

Two days later, OMB Director Richard Darman explained to the Senate Budget Committee that the problem was a Treasury Department accounting blunder. "As far as we understand, we made a mistake," he said. "There it is, let's face it and move on down the road."

Committee chairman Jim Sasser of Tennessee didn't buy Darman's cavalier position. "If you want to put that number in grisly perspective," he said, "it constitutes the entire amount of revenue we raised in the budget summit last year -- the total tax package over which we shed so much blood."