The NY Times reports for his budget proposal next week President Obama has "banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller."
This is the biggest change Obama has brought to Washington and America thus far. For 8 years George Bush didn't include a number of very expensive items in his budgets so as to make the deficit appear smaller than it really was. It's a vastly immoral way to run a country. Not only was it delivering to the American people a lie but it built a foundation for secrecy and allusion that haunted the Bush administration throughout its two-terms.
One of the biggest changes to the budget will come in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama will include the wars as budgeted items whereas President Bush did not, deciding instead to fund two wars with supplemental spending bills.
Director of OMB Peter Orszag tell it this way, “the president prefers to tell the truth,” he said, “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.” That's a telling statement from a nonpartisan government official.
By adding actual "real" accounting practices to the White House, it will add $2.7 trillion more to the deficit than it otherwise would have appeared under George Bush. The Bush administration preferred to hide such deficits with asterisks and footnotes rather than with the truth. So Obama inherits a much larger deficit than so-called fiscal conservative Republicans would like to admit. Presenting the truth in budgets is the only way to put the country back on a sound economic footing. This is just the beginning.
