Breaking from previous administrations, Obama’s budget acknowledged that fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will actually cost money; it conceded that big pay cuts for doctors treating Medicare patients would never be realized; it admitted that tens-of-billions of dollars in revenues generated by the alternative minimum tax would never be collected because Congress steps in each year to prevent millions of middle class families from paying the tax. (This year, the AMT patch arrived in the stimulus bill — at a cost of $70 billion. All of it borrowed.) And, rather than projecting the figures out for only five years (like President George W. Bush made a habit of doing), Obama’s budget looked 10 years ahead, to lend a better picture of the fiscal imbalances that loom further down the road.

Leave it to Congress to bring some of those gimmicks back.

Both Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) this week are considering spending proposals of their own, rife with some of the very tallying dishonesties that have plagued the past. An editorial in The Washington Post today has a concise rundown.

The congressional budgets, The Post points out, look ahead only five years. They eliminate $250 billion included in Obama’s budget for more Wall Street bailouts, though the lawmakers “have no reason to believe it won’t be needed.” And Spratt acknowledges only one year of funding for the AMT patch — not the required five — while Conrad includes only three years of AMT money.  The Post offers an explanation:

There’s no mystery as to the motivation for this dishonesty. Like Mr. Obama, the Democrats in Congress want to spend more on education, energy and other popular programs. Like Mr. Obama, they don’t want to level with voters about the need to pay for such programs through increased taxes. According to the CBO, Mr. Obama’s budget plan would have the government spending more than 23 percent of gross domestic product throughout the second half of this decade while collecting less than 19 percent in revenue. Rather than fix this problem, Mr. Conrad in his budget proposal closes his eyes and wishes it away.

Last month, Conrad said Obama’s plan “is a more accurate reflection” of federal spending than past budgets, and he went after GOP critics for “things that the other side is not counting at all,” pointing specifically to the AMT patch.

Conrad also gave a curious answer when asked specifically if the AMT fix should be offset:

I believe extending the alternative minimum tax past the next couple of years should be offset. And I have taken that position consistently.  I don’t think it should be offset at this time of severe economic weakness.  I think that would be counterproductive. But beyond the next couple of years, when we are now seeing forecasts from CBO and OMB of economic recovery, at that point, I think it should be offset.

Instead he did just the opposite, funding the AMT for three years before abandoning it later.

Both the House and Senate budget panels have plans to pass their proposals out of committee today, with the full chambers expected to consider them next week.

Experts have pointed out that real change in Washington comes only in times of severe crisis. At least as it pertains to budgets, it seems that the current crisis isn’t severe enough yet.

Among those gimmicks, Bush & Co. would tally the alternative minimum tax as revenue even as everyone knew that Congress tweaks the AMT law each year to prevent millions of families from paying the tax.

(Enacted in 1969, the AMT was targeted to the wealthy, but never indexed for inflation, leaving more and more middle class families to face the tax each year — and leaving Congress with little choice but to intervene or suffer the political consequences. But the intervention doesn’t come cheap, and the annual debate usually features a lot of (not-unjustified) screeching from fiscal hawks about how to offset the tab. The conclusion of this debate, at least recently, is always the same: borrow from abroad to “patch” the AMT, and someone else will pay the tab later.)

Budget watchdogs have cheered the Obama administration’s budget changes, the idea being that the more honest accounting — which will necessarily lead to much higher official deficits — will heighten the pressure on Washington lawmakers to balance the federal budget, thereby stemming our current reliance on borrowing from abroad to run the country.

The AMT change found a receptive audience in Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, who issued a statement Friday applauding the administration for eliminating the “phony revenue source:”

It’s good to see the White House and more and more Democrats finally recognize AMT revenue as the phony revenue source it is. I’ve sounded the drumbeat since 2001. Some Democrats agreed early on, but the House Democratic leaders held out last year as long as they could. It will be interesting to see whether they agree with the new Democratic president.

The statement makes Grassley out to be a champion of fiscal sobriety. Unmentioned was the fact that he was largely responsible for sticking a $70 billion AMT patch into the $787 billion economic stimulus bill signed by President Obama last week. Of course not one penny of that bill was offset.