Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
You come from such an absurd position that it is hard to know what to say. I might have a theory that Bush is really a catholic but he just hides it. There is no way to ever prove or disprove that theory. Same with this theory. Unless someone leaks that this is what happened this theory can never go beyond speculation.
Yet because people have been talking about the possibility that this might have happened you talk about it as if it were a fact. Just because people are suggesting this is a possiblity does not make it true.
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Perhaps you are misunderstanding me. All I'm accusing the White House of is mastering the release of budgetary information for maximum political spin. It's very simple: When they release estimates, they inflate the estimates. Then, when the actual numbers come out, they can say, here is the huge deficit but -- good news! -- it's not as bad as was predicted. As an example of the political arts it's very clever so long as people don't catch on, and that's not the sort of thing that newspaper reporters and TV journalists are likely to do, given the constraints under which they operate. Which the White House, being a bunch of pros, understands.
Instead of just calling this absurd, read The Economist:
- The more cynical observers suggested that the administration was simply releasing a gargantuan number for the pleasure of later telling voters that the budget deficit was closing faster than expected. In support of their argument, figures released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in March projected a deficit of only $365 billion.
When the OMB revised its numbers sharply downward in July, to $333 billion, the doubting Thomases seemed to have a good case.
It's more complicated than that, for reasons explained in what I linked to.
Of course, this is only a sideline to the argument you've been having about who is responsible for which deficits.
