George W. Bush used tricks to make his deficits look smaller, hiding more than $2.7 trillion!!
Obama has banned accounting gimmicks. “The president prefers to tell the truth rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”
“For too long, our budget process in Washington has been an exercise in deception — a series of accounting tricks to hide the extent of our spending and the shortfalls in our revenue and hope that the American people won’t notice…. budgeting zero dollars for the Iraq war — zero — for future years, even when we knew the war would continue; budgeting no money for natural disasters, as if we would ever go 12 months without a single flood, fire, hurricane or earthquake.”
“We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend,” the President said. “In order to address our fiscal crisis, we’re going to have to be candid about its scope.”