“IT’S CLEARLY A BUDGET. It’s got a lot of numbers in it,” George W. Bush told a reporter during his run for the presidency some four years ago. After examining the budget that the president submitted to Congress last week most of Washington is saying, “It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of lies in it.” Wall Street may be talking about the increasingly glowing profits reports that are now a daily occurrence, or the rise in consumer confidence to its highest level since July 2002, or–best of all–the revival of fee-generating merger activity. But in Washington, it’s all about the $2.4 trillion budget that the president has put before Congress.

With reason. A budget is, after all, more than “a lot of numbers.” It is a statement of the spending priorities of the administration in power, and of its attitude toward the trade-off between taxing and borrowing as the means of funding those priorities.