Budget Trickery By PETER SUDERMAN
“In the federal budget process, the baseline scenario is typically based on current law. But the Obama administration has argued that it should be able to work from “current policy.” That way, they can stuff all sorts of expensive future changes into the baseline.
Changing the baseline doesn’t generate any actual savings. But it allows the administration to ignore certain policies and only measure the changes that produce favorable results.
So this year, the White House decided to assume the cost of several provisions from its stimulus bill — expansions of the child tax credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Pell Grants — into its baseline. Those policies were all explicitly created to be temporary. But by quietly assuming they’ll continue on, the administration avoids accounting for $216 billion.
Congress has its own trickery. There’s a pay-as-you-go requirement that says every spending hike must be accompanied by a tax increase or cut somewhere else. But Congress disregards these rules all the time. Since 2007, Democrats in Congress have violated PAYGO requirements to the tune of nearly $1 trillion.”
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