The report on the federal deficit released yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office sent Democrats off into hyperventilation land. “President Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible President in our nation’s history. His tax cut and spending policies have led to a dangerous deterioration in our fiscal outlook, threatening the fundamental economic security of the nation,”said the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad of North Dakota. The former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, who is running for president, issued a statement saying, “At some point the American people will have to cut up George Bush’s credit card. The bills he is racking up are on our children and grandchildren’s tab. We owe it to them to put an end to this administration’s fiscal recklessness.”

Those in search of some perspective could refer to the actual CBO report, which said, “Last year’s deficit was smaller than those of the mid-1980s and early 1990s in relation to the size of the economy.” Or they could have checked out yesterday’s results on Wall Street, where the Dow Jones industrials reached a new 31-month high, rising more than 130 points. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq indexes also yesterday closed at levels higher than they closed at in months. We take that as the market shrugging off the Bill Clinton-Robert Rubin theory that a rising deficit increases interest rates and slows economic growth. Or at least casting doubt on the notion that a deficit of the size we’ve got now, for wartime and at the beginning of an economic recovery, is something to be particularly concerned about when it comes to “the fundamental economic security of the nation.”