Obama Wants To Move Away From The “Accounting Tricks” Of The Bush Administration

I’m not one to defend the Bush administration, or even many of the Republicans who served in Congress during his term in office, when it comes to spending. But when Obama says he’s going to end Bush’s “accounting tricks” he’s being dishonest.

…Obama criticized “the casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks, the costly overruns, the fraud and abuse, the endless excuses. This is exactly what the American people rejected when they went to the polls. They sent us here to usher in a new era of responsibility in Washington, to start living within our means again and being straight with them about where their tax dollars are going.”
Obama also made clear that he believe he was inheriting the current budget mess from Bush — even though roughly a quarter of the $1.3 trillion deficit stems directly from Obama’s recently economic stimulus package.
Still, Obama said he would break from several of Bush’s practices in building his own 10-year budget being released Thursday. Obama said he would put the full cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on the budget, and allocate money for natural disasters – two things Bush did not do.
“We do ourselves no favors by hiding the truth about what we spend. In order to address our fiscal crisis, we have to be candid about its scope,” Obama said.

It’s a bit of a stretch to accuse the Bush administration of “hiding the truth” for funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through “emergency” appropriations. Certainly every time more war funding was to be appropriated the Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media made a good deal of fuss about it. There was debate, and reams of stories written. Nobody was hiding anything
And, frankly, funding the war on its own seems appropriate to me. When we commit our troops to a war zone, and when we turn someone else’s country into a war zone, we owe it to all involved to pursue the matter vigorously or not at all. Given how prone the budgeting process is to being bogged down in politics, and given how often Democrats attempted to delay war funding out of a petty partisan interest in seeing at least the war in Iraq (if not the war in Afghanistan as well) lost, funding the wars through a series of bills that were voted through Congress on their own merits and not attached to other, unrelated spending seems logical.
It wasn’t about hiding the costs of the war. It was about making sure our troops weren’t left on the battlefield trying to fight the war with no resources backing them up.
As for budgeting for natural disasters, how absurd is that? I know that declaring natural disasters, and collecting the federal money that comes with it, has become big business in this country but should we really start including disaster spending in the budget? What if no disasters happen? What happens to that money then? What Obama’s talking about isn’t responsible budgeting. It’s about setting up a permanent victims’ entitlement.
I think what we’re really seeing from Obama here is not so much a move toward fiscal responsibility, but rather a tax and spend liberal who feels he’s vulnerable on spending issues and is going on the attack. Obama has already signed into law more spending than Iraq has represented in almost six years (the stimulus cost us $787 billion, the war in Iraq has cost less than $600 billion to date), and the measures he’s announced to cut the deficit aren’t likely to get the deficit even under $1 trillion.
Again, Obama feels vulnerable to criticism on spending. So what we’re seeing is a full court press to distract from that issue.