It gets worse and worse. The Bush administration now projects the budget deficit for the year beginning Oct. 1 will be $482 billion, up 18 percent from the $407 billion it forecast six months ago.

Last week Americans learned about another piece of spending irresponsibility -- that, as a result of the government bailout of lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (whose CEOs earn $11.6 million and $18.3 million, respectively), Congress was obliged to raise the ceiling on the national debt to $10.6 trillion. That's a debt "limit" of 14 digits for the first time.

Since it is the season for carnival shell games, it's worth looking closely at the numbers in the all-new-high budget deficit. It does not include, for example, the $80 billion that the administration estimates for the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next fiscal year. Excluding that expenditure is preposterous. It would be as if a member of a household was presenting the family budget for the coming year and added casually that it didn't include the mortgage payments.

The other piece of the budget shell game is the fact that, as of now, the wars are costing more than $2 billion a week. That comes to $104 billion per year, not $80 billion, unless we could imagine that a new president would stop spending money on the wars the minute he took office in January, another preposterous assumption. The budget deficit thus looks more like $586 billion.

What happened to the notion that George W. Bush was a fiscal conservative, even after cutting him slack for 9/11? Conservatism is supposed to mean financial responsibility, something that's been sorely lacking in nearly eight years of this president.

Now, in another clever sleight-of-hand, Americans are being asked to believe that the reason the budget will be in greater deficit than the earlier estimate is that tax revenues are declining. They are declining, of course -- because the economy is tanking.

The real question is why the economy is in misery. One reason is that the government -- the Democratic Congress, as well as the Republican president -- is spending more money it doesn't have and, in effect, borrowing it from China, India, the oil producers and Americans, thereby walking the country further out on a shaky limb.

Even with a change of administration next year, this is going to be a hard candy Christmas.