Aggressively Uninformed

Obama’s budget marks a return to accounting sanity. The Bush administration’s accounting of their budgeting process made liberal use of sleight of hand to obscure the true cost of their proposals. The Bush tax cuts were set to sunset in 2010, which allowed their accountants to limit their projected revenue impact, even though they always intended to extend the tax cuts eventually. The war in Iraq was always paid for year by year, with “supplementals” which were similarly kept off the books. Obama has moved to a “current policies” framework rather than a “current laws” framework, essentially projecting our current expenses forward rather than assuming that we’ll actually have an AMT next year and Iraq will just work itself out. One could argue that just as Bush did his accounting in the way that was maximally favorable to him, Obama is doing the same. For me, it boils down to a question of common sense. Does it make sense to assume that this is the last year the AMT is going to be patched, or the last year that we’re going to appropriate any money for Iraq? Does anybody who argues that we should account for the Bush tax cuts as a temporary measure actually think that they should be a temporary measure?