If the Bush-Cheney campaign is having trouble coming up with real issues to talk about, we're here to help. How about we start with the big sucking sound we're hearing from the economy:

Even if the United States saved billions of dollars by withdrawing all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush would still be unlikely to fulfill his promise to reduce the federal budget deficit by half within five years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

In the final independent assessment of Mr. Bush's fiscal policies before the November election, the Congressional agency predicted that, if no existing laws changed, the federal deficit would see a much smaller decline, to $312 billion in 2009 from a record of $422 billion in 2004.

[. . .]

Over the next 10 years, the budget office said, the federal debt could swell by $4.9 trillion and climb rapidly after that as the nation's baby boomers start to draw Social Security and Medicare.

If Mr. Bush persuades Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, the federal deficit will increase to about $500 billion in 2009. The new estimate is the first time the Congressional agency has projected that Mr. Bush will probably fail to achieve his goal of reducing the deficit by half in five years.

[ . . .]

But this new report is sobering because Congressional analysts reached their conclusions even when they used extremely optimistic assumptions about war costs in Iraq and robust economic growth over the next few years.

"The message is that you cannot grow your way out of this," said Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office. (New York Times)