budget gimmicks

President Obama made headlines last month when he announced a budget wishlist eliminating a number of budget gimmicks used by Washington policymakers to, in effect, purposefully lie to the country about how much the government will collect and spend.
Breaking from previous administrations, Obama’s budget acknowledged that fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will actually [...]

In a welcome break from past policy, the Obama administration last week announced that it will abandon a handful of deceptive budget gimmicks used perennially by the Bush administration to make federal deficits appear much smaller than they actually were.
Among those gimmicks, Bush & Co. would tally the alternative minimum tax as revenue even as [...]