George W. Bush has promised to half the deficit by the end of his term in the White House, but at what real cost? The Washington Post's team of Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker report that if the President's plans take effect, the deficit could reach upwards of $700 billion within a decade.

For President Bush, the budget sent to Congress last week outlines a painful path to meeting his promise to bring down the federal budget deficit by the time he leaves office in 2009. But for the senators and governors already jockeying to succeed him, the numbers released in recent days add up to a budgetary landmine that could blow up just as the next president moves into the Oval Office.

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If Congress were to pass Bush's Social Security plan and permanently extend his tax cuts, the budget deficit would bottom out at $251 billion in 2008, then climb steadily to $335 billion by 2015, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and the House Budget Committee's Democratic staff. Those figures assume, however, that Bush will secure all of his proposed spending cuts, that he will need no more emergency war spending and that there will be no changes to the alternative minimum tax, which Bush and other politicians want to rewrite to keep it from affecting more middle-class families in coming years. The AMT originally was designed to make sure wealthy people couldn't avoid paying some taxes.

With a fix to the AMT, deficits in a decade would likely reach $650 billion to $700 billion, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). "The days of being everything to everybody are quickly coming to a close," he said, adding that a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts would make it politically impossible to borrow the full cost of a Social Security fix. "We have to look at the deficit in a holistic way."

Americans need to understand that the Republican Party has adopted a platform which if enacted in earnest would truly bankrupt this country. It's good to see an article like this on the front page of the Post, but this is only the beginning. Hopefully the rest of the mainstream media will get its act together and cover this story -- about how this President wants to destroy the American government -- as it deserves to be covered.