The short answer is a near-term surplus, barring some hare-brained spending or tax cuts from Malcolm Turnbull.
After three years of surplus, the government's finances will be in deficit for the rest of Mr Bush's first term, and the guesstimate for the longer-term surplus is melting away.
With surpluses apparently having given way to deficits in the short run, and with the long-term surplus a fraction of what was anticipated a year ago, both parties are being forced to scale back plans for initiatives like providing retirees with help buying prescription medicine.
Congress and the White House will update their long-term surplus projections over the summer; both will rise substantially, reflecting the strength of tax receipts this year and the spreading consensus that the economy is capable of higher rates of noninflationary growth than in the past.
They said the long-term fiscal outlook remains bleak, and they renewed their argument that the root of the problem was Mr. Bush's insistence last year in pushing through a $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut on the basis of long-term surplus projections that were wildly optimistic.
But they said the assumptions behind the long-term surplus projections were conservative and that the nation was in no danger of a return to budget deficits of the sort that plagued the United States during the 1980's and 1990's.
Ms Ell also explained that the government was "accepting its budget blowout rather than cutting back spending further to get a medium-term surplus".
Nor, of course, did Bush campaign on the pledge that he would take the long-term surplus in the federal budget he inherited from Clinton and turn it into more debt, during his term, than all of the presidents before him in American history put together.
Unable to find decent jobs, and unwilling to take what's left, many of those left behind in the transformation to a global economy--what writers like Noam Chomsky and Christian Parenti have termed "surplus labor" or "surplus population --turned to the two sides of the War on Drugs for economic sustenance: drug dealing and criminal justice.
