These are not happy days for the fiscal fear-mongers. The deficit has been falling rapidly even in the absence of a grand bargain to slash entitlements and raise taxes. Both sides have given up for now on the elaborate charade of super-committees and debt commissions, which, for several years now, have accomplished nothing but nudging the country toward a premature austerity that, many economists now agree, undermined our economic recovery. Instead, today’s New York Times reports that “in a shift from deficit concerns,” the Senate is on the verge of passing the extension of a whole swath of business tax breaks without finding any way to pay for them.

It is, in other words, not an auspicious moment for the annual “Fiscal Summit” hosted in Washington today by the Peterson Foundation, the organization funded by private-equity titan and Social Security antagonist Pete Peterson. But when a billionaire’s footing the bill and a former president is on the guest list, it’s not like you just call the whole thing off. So the event proceeded, with all the awkwardness of a wedding anniversary party where everyone in attendance knows that the husband and wife are both in the midst of torrid affairs.

Then again, carrying the event off was perhaps not so difficult to do, given that these summits have from the start been built around a different sort of truth-avoidance. Peterson and his ideological allies promote a specific, non-unanimous agenda—prioritizing deficit and debt reduction above all else via deep reductions in Social Security and Medicare and increases in taxes (in that order of preference). That is their prerogative as advocates. But the summits they host to this end are framed as if they’re being held on behalf of some universal, noncontroversial cause—a framing that, among other things, enables the participation of straight-news journalists who would shy away from engaging in similarly slanted events on different issues. Those involved act as if the summits are but a wonkier cousin of a Take Back the Night rally or a breast cancer awareness promo. They are not.

With such disingenuousness at their base, it is no surprise that the events are riddled with moments of elision, hypocrisy or outright dishonesty that are allowed to pass unchallenged by complaisant moderators. There was nothing at today’s event to compare with the spectacle of the tax-slashing Paul Ryan being awarded a “Fiscy Award,” as he was in 2011 shortly after he helped torpedo the Simpson-Bowles debt-commission report hailed by many fiscal hawks.

But there were still some choice moments. There was Columbia economics professor Glenn Hubbard fretting that “we risk becoming a nation of entitlements.” Yes, that is the same Glenn Hubbard who was chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers while the unpaid-for Medicare drug benefit was being crafted in 2003 and who helped design the deficit-expanding tax cuts of 2003.