While we await his State of the Union speech and the Bush budget for FY2008, the media focus remains fixed, oddly, on the President's pledge last week that, despite his profligate past, he will balance the federal budget by 2012. As we and others have suggested, this pledge shouldn't be taken seriously. A Washington Post article today on the topic asserts that "the politically perilous work of making that happen -- cutting spending or raising taxes -- falls to the Democratic-run Congress." But why should this Congress take the President's budget seriously either? In recent years, Bush has submitted budgets with proposed spending cuts that the GOP-controlled Congress refused to support. And Bush may have in mind accomplishing his goal by once again putting off much of the hard work of cutting spending and raising revenue until after he leaves office. Even conservative analysts such as Chris Edwards, tax director at the Cato Institute, are skeptical: I get the impression they're trying to beef up his reputation for fiscal responsibility, not by doing heavy lifting and actually targeting programs like farm subsidies, but through rhetoric and projections and changes in rules and things that are easy for a president to propose.