ECO-TERROR
A work of budgetary fiction: President George W. Bush's com-pendious US federal budget for 2004 went on sale in government bookstores yesterday. Too bad they do not have a fiction department to put it in.
The budget, which Congress will consider over the next few months, is disingenuous in its explanations of how the US went from record surplus to record deficit on Mr Bush's watch, dishonest in its claims about how the administration's tax plans will affect the economy and irresponsible in shuffling off to Congress the job of finding new spending restraints.
The president himself sets the tone, right at the outset in the foreword. "A recession and a war we did not choose have led to the return of deficits," he says. Well, up to a point.