President Barack 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 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.
That's
according to a study by the budget sleuths at a Washington think called
the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, a business-funded group
that advocates cutting deficits.
Here's how:
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