I can’t wait to see how President Bush deals with the record deficits he’s run up while making good on his post-election pledge to use his “mandate” to reform Social Security and the tax code.

Never has so much red ink been finessed so disingenuously by a White House for so little good.

You almost have to sympathize with the president’s dilemma. After all, if John Kerry had won, his team could have resorted to a time-honored Washington ritual to get our fiscal house in order.

The script? Kerry would have named a budget staff a few weeks after the election. The budget director would have set to work on Kerry’s plan. Soon after, the Kerry team would have come before the cameras and cried, “Omigod! They cooked the books! The deficits are MUCH worse than we thought during the campaign.”

This would have become the predicate for revisiting a few policies, and in short order the budget would have been on the path to balance.

It’s obviously harder for George Bush to say, “Omigod! We cooked the books!” Though at this point I wouldn’t put anything past Karl Rove, the political world’s version of the action heroes in “The Incredibles.”

(As an aside, isn’t it now clear that a better investment of all those liberal billionaires’ millions would have been to buy Rove a nice desert island if he’d only have agreed to retire from the game? Wouldn’t that have been infinitely more consequential for the campaign than all those 527 ads?)

So what will Bush do?

On Social Security, give the president credit for guts. In 2000, he talked about the need to reform the system, and as I said he would, he nearly won the election. This time he talked about it again, and he won the election fair and square.

Bush also won the senior vote, even though Democrats uncorked their usual scare tactics on Social Security in the waning days of the campaign. (This astounding fact ought to inspire Democrats to revisit their entire approach to these issues, but that’s grist for another day.)

But Bush’s numbers (and thus his entire proposal) on Social Security remain deeply dishonest. Bush wants to partially privatize the system. The trick in switching midstream from today’s “pay as you go” toward a pre-funded private retirement system is that one generation has to pay twice: first for the retirement of its parents, and then for its own, since younger folks in a private scheme will start paying for themselves.

Credible plans like this thus require at least $1 trillion in “transition” costs – at a time when Bush is already running deficits of $400 billion as far as the eye can see. There’s no free lunch.

It’s the same with Bush’s call for tax reform. I’m open-minded, but I’ve never seen a tax “simplification” proposal (read: “flatter” tax) that doesn’t reduce the burden on the wealthy while shifting it to middle- and lower-income folks. We’ve done enough of this already thanks to President Bush. It’s wrong.

It’s also the leading reason for his record deficits, which have already led Bush to ask for a $2 trillion increase in the official debt limit of the United States.

This path isn’t sustainable. Bush shows no signs of understanding or caring about this.

“If there was a need to raise taxes,” Bush said the other day, “I’d say, Let’s have a tax bill that raises taxes,’ as opposed to, Let’s simplify the tax code and sneak a tax increase on the people,’ It’s just not my style.”

Honest budgeting isn’t the president’s style either. Bush has proposed annual federal spending of around 20 percent of GDP (less than the 22 percent of GDP that his father and Ronald Reagan incurred). Bush has meanwhile lowered taxes from 20 percent of GDP to around 16 percent of GDP.

That’s lower than at any time since the 1950s, before Social Security was fully phased in, before Medicare and Medicaid (which he’s been expanding) were enacted, before federal student loans were created, and more.

Bush’s favorite canard – that the way out is through “spending discipline” – would require far more dramatic action on spending than Newt Gingrich’s revolutionaries ever contemplated. And back then, fearing public disapproval, the GOP lost its nerve far short of Newt’s tamer ideas.

Bush will soon have to at least pretend to square these circles. The question is whether the press will expose his charades (assuming he won’t end them) – or whether it will simply cover Bush’s claims stenographically, as if truth and falsehood had equal claims to “fair treatment” in the debate.

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist and author. He can be reached on the Web at: www.mattmilleronline.com.