Mangling expectations: Today the headlines are full of the good news that the Bush administration’s budget-deficit predictions of six months ago were wrong, and that, miraculously, the budget has $100 billion more in it than the Office of Management and Budget thought it would have at this time. So, was the OMB wrong back in March and is it right now? And what if this is not the first, but the third time that a similar pattern of annual Bush budget buggering has occurred?

Felix Gillette points out in the Columbia Journalism Review that this is indeed the third year in a row that OMB has issued dismal deficit predictions early in the year followed by happy-happy, joy-joy announcements that the gloom was premature and there’s actually googobs more money in the budget than we thought there would be six months ago. He offers some examples of how the MSM routinely reports on the OMB’s cash-flow crowing without questioning the predictable pattern, beginning with 2006:

“The White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to announce Tuesday that, because of the increased tax receipts, the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what was projected six months ago,” Bloomberg News reported.

Sound familiar? It should.

That’s more or less the exact trick the OMB trotted out for the media this time last year. Witness the following account in the Financial Times from July 2005.

“After several years of embarrassing budget figures, the Bush administration yesterday had good news to report,” noted the Times. “The administration, which released its mid-session budget review yesterday, boosted its forecasts for tax revenues following stronger than expected tax receipts to date in the fiscal year that ends in September.”

“It cut its forecast for the fiscal 2005 budget deficit to $333bn … less than the forecast it released in February and a sharp reduction from the $412bn deficit in 2004,” added the Times.

That announcement, in turn, came on the heels of the OMB’s cheerful forecast one year earlier that the federal budget deficit in 2004 was turning out to be significantly less than — surprise, surprise — earlier predictions.

“And today, the White House unveiled its midsession budget review estimates,” reported National Public Radio in July 2004. “It showed a budget deficit of $445 billion for this year, up from $374 billion in fiscal 2003. But Joshua Bolten, President Bush’s budget director, presented it as good news because it’s $76 billion less than the White House projected in February.”

So, we can expect the now traditional sight of the Accountant In Chief telling reporters how the deficit is lower than predicted because of job growth and tax cuts and a robust economy due wholly and solely to his whiz-bang economic policies — not because the OMB jiggered the books to make the boss look good.

Trouble is, willing or not, we are all stakeholders in BushCo, but unlike coporations in the real world that are answerable to shareholders, we don’t have the luxury of being able to sell off something that smells like Enron and buy into an alternative that exercises real fiscal responsibility.