A fundamental fiscal deception

Layer 4 involves the too-clever word games. When pressed, Administration officials can correctly argue that their carefully-phrased language acknowledges the gimmicks in layer 2. The Administration isn’t technically lying to you — as I showed yesterday, they explicitly acknowledge the “including the $1 T of spending cuts already enacted” point, and while the President’s statements are highly misleading, they are also technically true. It’s just that almost nobody understands the artful phrasing that leads you to an incorrect conclusion that they don’t actually say.

Layer 5 is that the President’s plan and communications strategy appear predicated on this rhetorical misdirection. If you reject the budget gimmicks in layer 2, then the $4T and “balanced deficit reduction” claims are invalid, and the conclusions the Administration misleadingly allows you to draw (but technically doesn’t say) are flawed. I can’t see how this can be anything other than an intentional strategy centered on taking advantage of the reality that (almost) nobody understands all this budget stuff.

Most observers and press are focused on layers 1, 2, and 3(a). Almost everyone understands the war funding gimmick by now, so it comes up repeatedly in discussion. I think the problems go deeper — layers 4 and 5 bug me even more. Budget scoring is an arcane subject, and there are always judgment calls to be made. I have yet to see a budget (from either party) that doesn’t contain at least a few questionable scoring calls and gimmicks, most of which are secondary to the real hard policy choices made in the rest of the budget. In this case, however, the President’s argument rests on scoring gimmicks that are indisputably dishonest. And there’s no way that can be an accident.