President Obama’s budget is “relying on a series of familiar accounting tricks to show $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade, an amount that would shrink by almost half if they were excluded.” But, that doesn’t show the real picture. The Associated Press,
But so-called “pay-go” rules officially require tax cuts and new spending on the mandatory side of the ledger to be balanced by new revenues or spending cuts elsewhere. Mandatory spending, like fees that Medicare pays to doctors, runs on autopilot.
The accounting steps essentially inflate the White House’s “baseline” predictions of future deficits. Then the White House claims greater deficit savings than it otherwise could if it played by the budget rules followed by the Congressional Budget Office, whose estimates lawmakers have to follow.
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