Good news: Budget tricks to be abandoned
I’ve noticed that many executives try to tinker with how things are measured if the measurements are unsatisfactory—much easier to bend the needle so that it’s not in the red than to actually fix the boiler. Easier and dangerous. But the Center for American Progress notes:
For the budget he will present next week, President Obama "has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller." The move away from budget gimmicks, one of which used to be failing to note the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will create "a budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear."
