WACO, Texas - Welcome back to Bush's Choices Chronicles, where we examine just exactly what we as a nation can't afford so that he can award tax cuts to people who don't need them.

Regrettably, the Chronicles have been on hiatus for a few months, basically because Bush appeared resolute about not making any choices.

He went about pumping up military spending and homeland security, enhancing Medicare, rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan and barely touching discretionary spending.

An exasperated Cato Institute, a free-market think tank solidly in Bush's corner, now calls him the "biggest-spending president in U.S. history."

Bush has vowed that he will rein in discretionary spending and wipe out the record projected $521 billion deficit, even while making temporary tax cuts permanent.

The promise might satisfy his legions. It doesn't satisfy Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who says the only way to keep the tax cuts and balance the budget is to start whacking at Social Security and other entitlements.

The most venerated Greenspan, said the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, has created an "emperor-has-no-clothes" situation for the president.

"If none of Bush's tax cuts are rolled back," writes Dionne, "continuing deficits will place immense pressure on Social Security and Medicare."

Dionne credited Waco Congressman Chet Edwards as one who appears to have his math skills down. In light of Greenspan's comments last week, Edwards asserted that staying the course is "digging a massive hole for our children and grandchildren."

Part of that hole is a budget item beyond discretion: interest on the national debt. This nation next year is projected to owe $372 billion in interest alone on a national debt which recently surged past $7 trillion.

Does anyone remember when the federal government actually bought back some of that debt for the first time in decades? It was four years ago.

Does anyone recall that Bush, running for president, said he would set aside $2.4 trillion in surplus dollars "to strengthen Social Security and pay all benefits"?

Issues of solvency demand that the Social Security cash-flow equation change - maybe graduating benefits according to retirees' incomes as Ross Perot has urged, or raising the retirement age.

As necessary as changes will be to guarantee that our children have Social Security, it's outrageous to think of benefits being cut not to assure its solvency but to make up ground for disastrous blue-sky budgets that misled taxpayers into crippling deficits.

Truth in labeling needed to apply long ago to barkers who said that we could leave almost two-thirds of the federal budget off the table (defense spending, entitlements and debt service) and cut taxes arbitrarily and across the board.

Greenspan had advice last week for those people: Check your math.