Remember, this is the President who pledged not to leave problems for future generations to solve.

An Undiplomatic Display (washingtonpost.com): "Back in January 2002, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., then director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, was predicting that the budget deficit could mushroom to $100 billion. He said the good news was that a $100 billion deficit would be only about 1 percent of the gross domestic product, compared with the 3 percent to 5 percent budget deficits the federal government ran during the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s.

And here's Vice President Cheney talking Sunday to Tim Russert on 'Meet the Press,' just 20 months later about the $500 billion deficit we're now facing.

'The deficit that we're running today, after we get the approval of the $87 billion, will still be less . . . than it was back in the '80s or the deficits we ran in the '90s. We're still about 4.7 percent of our total GDP. So the notion that the United States can't afford this or that we shouldn't do it is, I think, seriously flawed.'

For the record, that would be tied for the fifth-highest deficit in the past 50-plus years. The highest four as a percentage of GDP, during the Reagan administration, were 6.1 percent, 5.2 percent, 5.1 percent and 4.9 percent."