When you discover someone has lied to you, do you usually become upset? I usually do. And so the memory of our leading politicians lying to us last week is not a nice one. It reminded me of the lies of Richard Nixon. And those of Bill Clinton. And those of Spiro Agnew. And the lies of politicians in our lifetime who ended up in jail for them.

The lies of which I speak came from our president. And from the Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress. You remember they waged an almighty battle over cuts to the rest of this year’s federal budget. They settled on $38 billion.

Before they fought with each other to come to that figure they camped out before TV cameras. They portrayed the pushing and pulling and threats they used to protect our interests. They threatened to close down the government. The President waded into all of this. I’m sure you remember.

These were massive cuts, painful cuts they told us. Even though they amount to little when compared with the entire budget.

Well, they were lying. No sooner had they spelled out the cuts than various analysts sniffed out the truth. Then Congress’s own Budget Office ran the numbers and revealed the truth.

The truth is that these cuts were not cuts at all. The CBO calculates they will make a difference of only a few hundred million dollars. The rest of the over  $37 billion in cuts are fake.