To get a more true picture, look at the debt, which continues to increase daily. Social Security will need to be pumped up before 2012, so this current report by the President is a sham.
It is a humorless joke.
Agreed. The following graph shows a number of projections from the CBO report:
The actual numbers are at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/cbobud07.html. As can be seen, the on-budget deficit, which excludes the surplus borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, is projected to be $339 billion, over twice as large as the reported deficit of $158 billion. If all trust fund surpluses are excluded, the deficit is projected to be $448 billion, nearly three times as large.
In any event, the reported deficit is projected to increase through 2010 and then decrease rapidly, becoming a surplus in 2012. However, that assumes that all of Bush's tax cuts expire as they are scheduled to under current law. If those tax cuts are extended as Bush proposes, the reported deficit is projected to continue growing, reaching a half-trillion dollars per year by 2017. Excluding all trust fund surpluses, it will reach $894 billion per year by 2017. More importantly, the gross federal debt is projected to rise to nearly $20 trillion, increasing from the current 64.7% of GDP to 91.5% of GDP. The projected "surplus" that Bush speaks about in 2012 is a scam.