Quote from Mav88:
We know that future projections are pretty hard, but it's even harder when all the assumptions about it are biased towards the rosy side to make yourself look better.
In addition to everything else, now they're adding a new wrinkle. These massive new spending items on the budget, like the bailout, have been secretly(?) converted to NPR (net present value accounting) to make them look smaller. Had Obama and Geithner not made these secret(?) changes, the budget deficit would have been over 2 trillion this fiscal year, instead of 1.8 trillion. The administration wanted it to look better, for, ahem, political reasons. An onlooker discovered this when he saw that the budget deficit for march had magically(?) gone down by 175 billion in april.
It is safe to assume, according to the article, that this administration has plans to use these kind of accounting obfuscations for all of its multi trillion dollar investments, making their cost projections a farce. (hint: they will cost much more than obama says)
This isn't the typical gov't cheesy accounting we're all use to, no, this is stepping it up considerably to a whole new level of depravity.
note: it even effects things like whether they will allow banks to pay back tarp money, because if the banks pay it back, it <i>increases the deficit</I>, as hard as that is to believe.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/federal-deficit-becomes-nearly-indecipherable/