Largely absent from the media is the story that the 10 year budget deficits forecast by the "nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office" have been slashed dramatically. During the run up to last years election, predictions of huge deficits were trumpeted throughout the media. While any 10 year forecast is dubious at best, the silence on the news of the adjustment is deafening.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is likely to estimate Tuesday that shortfalls over the next 10 years will total perhaps $1 trillion less than the $2.3 trillion in red ink it forecast last September, congressional aides say.

That is a cut of more than 43%, but the media is reporting this as a technicality. The news is technically good, because the CBO forecast doesn't include any Iraq war funding.

When the budget office issued its last update in September, it assumed the roughly $112 billion Congress approved for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan last year would be repeated every year for a decade.

But Congress has yet to approve any war money in 2005. So the budget office is required to assume that there won't be any new war funds provided this year.

Well, why even bother doing forecasts? If you cannot make logical assumptions the forecast isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Forecasts from the "nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office" are nothing more than masturbatory exercises that give politicians on each side of the aisle fodder to throw at each other. I guess that is what makes it nonpartisan. They're doing nothing more than creating sound bytes for themselves.