Obama exposes Bush's accounting gimmicks, $2.7 trillion in additional spending

[bascule]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/us/politics/20budget.html?_r=2

 

WASHINGTON — For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

 

Is this a partisan move, or one towards better transparency?

 

Personally I opt for the latter, and am glad to see these sorts of things exposed.

[Pangloss]

I guess the Bush administration has now become "the Enron of presidential administrations", in addition to all their other labels. Oh well.

[iNow]

From the article linked in the OP:

 

As for war costs, Mr. Bush included little or none in his annual military budgets, instead routinely asking Congress for supplemental appropriations during the year. Mr. Obama will include cost projections for every year through the 2019 fiscal year to cover “overseas military contingencies” — nearly $500 billion over 10 years.

 

For Medicare, Mr. Bush routinely budgeted less than actual costs for payments to physicians, although he and Congress regularly waived a law mandating the lower reimbursements for fear that doctors would quit serving beneficiaries in protest.

 

Mr. Obama will budget $401 billion over 10 years for higher costs and interest on the debt.

 

He will also budget $273 billion in that period for natural disasters. Every year the government pays billions for disaster relief, but presidents and lawmakers have long ignored budget reformers’ calls for a contingency account to reflect that certainty.

 

 

Fascinating. I'm inclined to agree with both Bascule and the article in that this brings much needed transparency.

 

Further, this brings much needed integrity and sincerity to the accounting.

 

 

“The president prefers to tell the truth,” he said, “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”

[Pangloss]

So now you all agree with me that NSF funding had no place in the stimulus bill. Cool.

 

Also, I noticed the interesting equation of transparency and accountability with the idea of predictability in the first paragraph of that quote above. An interesting thing, given the fact that we just spent a trillion dollars off the books, unsupported by income, and already acknowledged to be insufficient to the purpose. Meaning we're going to do it again, not budgeted, but on the spur of the moment, "as needed".

 

Interesting.

[iNow]

So now you all agree with me that NSF funding had no place in the stimulus bill. Cool.

Pangloss - No offense, but have you been posting high lately? What are you talking about, my friend?

[bascule]

Hey mods, can you correct the thread title to $2.7 trillion?

 

Whoops

[Pangloss]

Pangloss - No offense, but have you been posting high lately? What are you talking about, my friend?

 

I'm simply pointing out that putting funding for the National Science Foundation in the economic stimulus package was, under the terms of moral judgment stated in this thread, exactly the same thing as hiding secret spending on Iraq. Funny thing about politics: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

[iNow]

putting funding for the National Science Foundation in the economic stimulus package was...exactly the same thing as hiding secret spending on Iraq.

 

And how's that... exactly?

[Mokele]

Actually, funding the NSF is among the best ways to get economic stimulus. You give grants to scientists, who will promptly spend *all* of it in 3 years or so on lab equipment, personnel, supplies, post-docs, and plane tickets for fieldwork and conferences, thereby giving that money to the employees of the lab equipment companies, the lab techs and post-docs, the airplane company employees, etc. And most of those people are middle to lower class of income, and thus will spend it on food, rent, car payments, etc.

 

How does it differ for paying for bridge of be built? Same principle - get something done and employ people to do it.

[iNow]

Yes, but Pangloss appears to be trying to make some sort of point about secrecy. He explicitly said that adding funds to the stimulus package for NSF is exactly the same as secret spending for war in Iraq.

 

When I read this, it comes across as purely non-sequitur. I mean, zuh??? All you need to see that they are different is to recognize that one is being made and discussed publically while the other is not. Further, one is something which will have multiplier effects in our own economy and the other is something that will not (unless you're Haliburton). There are other differences, but the point has been made. The two are NOT equal.

 

I'm sure (as usual) Pangloss has a broader point which he can support, but his posts to this thread seem to be relying on some secret language (winks and nods) that maybe we'd all understand if we spent countless hours arguing on politics boards with people using decoder rings.

 

However, since I don't, I'm failing to make the connect he's trying to draw. Listing NSF in the stimulus and providing funds to them = secrectly funding war in Iraq and lying to the public about the specific amount of money going there? I'm just not making that connection here, and it seems rather elusive and based on some desire to conflate the actions of Bush in Iraq with the actions of Obama with the stimulus. Hell, even Pangloss' first response in post #2 of this thread is tries to tangentialize this to be about "bush bashing" instead of discussing the change described in the OP about accounting practices.

Edited February 22, 2009 by iNow

[Pangloss]

I am not the one who raised the issue of transparency in this thread. I'm simply responding to that point with an obvious correlation to an obvious conflict with what this group seemed to favor when the shoe was on a different foot.

 

We're not talking only about Iraq funding in this thread, iNow, we're talking about the entire budget. Please do try to stay on subject.

 

By the way, did you hear your "Nobel Prize-winning economist" Krugman this morning on This Week say that he thought having some expenses outside of the budget was a good idea? That's the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that he sells out his objective value as an economist for ideological gain. Defense spending = bad, social spending = good. That's the Paul Krugman idea of economic science.

[Mokele]

What was not transparent about including NSF funding in the stimulus bill? Everyone knew exactly what was in that bill, and especially so because the contents were debated so vigorously. Hell, Wikipedia lists what was in it, and if that's not transparency, I don't know what is.

[Pangloss]

So you know every bit of spending that was in the stimulus bill, then?

[Mokele]

No, but only because I don't care. If I did care, I could go look it up.

[Pangloss]

And we know what's been spent on Iraq, too. We're sitting here talking about it, so by your definition how is it not transparent?

 

What I think is that if the line item in question were about keeping another Terri Schiavo alive (assuming Republicans were still in power) then you and everyone else on this board would be falling all over themselves to reach the keyboard so they could accuse Republicans of trying to hide such funding in this bill. Hide. To sneak one over on us. To pull the wool over people's eyes. You know. The opposite of transparency.

[iNow]

Paul Krugman?

Terri Schiavo?

 

Wow, dude. Can you just answer the damn questions and stop with the red herrings?

[Pangloss]

I don't appreciate that reply. If you can't come up with an intelligent response to my perfectly reasonable questions, then you should not hit the post button at all.

 

Would you like to have a discussion about that, or can we return to talking about the economy? You're all hot and bothered about subject changes lately, and yet here you are turning this into a discussion about Pangloss. Wow, dude. Can you just answer the damn questions and stop with the red herrings?

[Mokele]

First, it's not the presence/absence of the item, but the cost. Bush's accounting gimicks concealed the cost and made it appear lower.

 

Second, you're skirting some seriously fallacious territory by telling me what I would and wouldn't do in response to an analogous situation.

 

Mokele

[Pangloss]

Hmm, nnnnnnoooooooooo it does seem to be the presence or absence of an item that matters. I mean, just going by the OP and subsequent responses. Let's take a look:

 

Is this a partisan move' date=' or one towards better transparency?

 

Personally I opt for the latter, and am glad to see these sorts of things exposed.[/quote']

 

Fascinating. I'm inclined to agree with both Bascule and the article in that this brings much needed transparency.

 

Further' date=' this brings much needed integrity and sincerity to the accounting.

[/quote']

[Mokele]

How do those quotes support your claim? *Nothing* in this thread or the original article is about completely concealing the existence of a spending source, only about concealing it's magnitude from the people.

 

Honestly, I don't know where you're getting this. The topic of the thread, and the original article, was about accurate cost representation for *known expenses*, not about completely concealing the expense.

[Pangloss]

How do those quotes support your claim? *Nothing* in this thread or the original article is about completely concealing the existence of a spending source, only about concealing it's magnitude from the people.

 

Honestly, I don't know where you're getting this. The topic of the thread, and the original article, was about accurate cost representation for *known expenses*, not about completely concealing the expense.

 

How is that different from the inclusion of NSF funding in the economic stimulus bill? You can say what you like about its economic impact, but many inclusions on that bill were done for ideological reasons and then back-justified for their economic impact. That's a violation of transparency. I get that you guys are angry with me for attacking your pet science funding, but this is about politics, and as such I think these comparisons are valid.

 

If you want to find some common ground here we can say this is ultimately a matter of opinion, and perhaps NSF funding might even be an efficient way to boost the economy. But like it or not there are people in this country who will see no less validity in their own opinions about spending versus yours. That's how it is in a democracy.

[Mokele]

How is that different from the inclusion of NSF funding in the economic stimulus bill? You can say what you like about its economic impact, but many inclusions on that bill were done for ideological reasons and then back-justified for their economic impact.

 

How on earth does that have anything to do with transparency?

 

You're talking about concealing motives, I'm talking about concealing actual costs. We can bicker about which is worse, but they are indisputably different.

 

Let's say I'm selling you a car. There's a big difference between trying to sell you the sunroof option for an extra $150, and me selling you the car for $15k, then charging you $17k for it via hidden costs and accounting tricks. The former is just sales, the latter is outright theft.

 

You're verging on strawman here by trying to lump these two highly dissimilar things together. Transparency is about revealing what the government *does*, not motive. The only way to assess motive is to require 24/7 fMRI scans of everyone in Congress.

[Pangloss]

No costs were concealed regarding Iraq funding, Mokele. The accusation is that they were "creatively managed", etc. Not hidden, just buried under mounds of rubble.

 

Which is exactly where NSF funding was placed in the stimulus bill. You wouldn't have known about it any more than I would have were it not for the fact that some enterprising opponent dug it out and shoved it under the nose of some reporter. SIGNERS aren't even reading it, much less every citizen.

 

So again, what is the difference?

[Mokele]

Sorry, I'm just not convinced. The stimulus bill is, by it's nature, just a long list of expenses and tax cuts - things are no more 'hidden' than eggs are 'hidden' in my grocery list.

 

In contrast, budgeting for less than you'll actually pay doctors for medicare services, then simply paying them the full amount, that's a sleazy way to make the numbers look good.

[Pangloss]

So does that mean that you feel that the exposure of the NSF funding to a reporter was a bad thing? That I should have known that funding was there and stated my objection before it was headlined?

 

Because if the answer to that question is "yes", then you're saying that one type of transparency is good, but another type of transparency is bad, because it threatens a specific type of spending that you happen to approve of.