Lil White Lies: Battle of the Bulge

As noted in my profile and a my last Sidebar post, I’ve made some analogies to my employment with “one of the Big Three” domestic automakers. This one draws on my accounting experience some years ago working in “Budget and Forecast”, to wit: one time “emergency” temporary expenditures, budget-wise, are not relevant to the base budget when discussing either decreases or increases. Let me repeat that with appropriate words emboldened: one time “emergency” temporary expenditures, budget-wise, are not relevant to the base budget when discussing either decreases or increases.

So my conservative counterpart, as with his previous commentary to my criticism of his treatment of a remark by Alan Grayson, misses again the overall “big picture”—Jeb Hensarling’s gross exaggeration (which he admits) of the increase in the budgets of various government departments due to the temporary effects of the stimulus, should be considered false because they are not relevant: even Hensarling stated “this is not the forum in which to debate the stimulus.”

It’s like a family budget where in a single month the car breaks down, and the car insurance/property taxes are due, it’s mid winter and there’s been a freeze and your home heating bill is through the roof, but in the mood for future travel you decide to open a travel-point Visa credit card at the Bank of Hensarling, but it denies you in a rejection letter saying “Your expenses appear to greatly exceed your ability to pay, so we cannot grant you credit at this time.” Is that a fair assessment of your creditworthiness and what occurred budget-wise for you that month? Did your budget grow if you had set aside for insurance, taxes and emergencies?

Somebody lost his marbles on
criticizing this ruling.

In other words, as Elmendorf stated, what the family really had was “a bulge in discretionary funding and then to uh, um, an attenuated bulge in outlays.” That’s why writer Lou Jacobson said that what is known as outlays is “a distinction that becomes important to [the] analysis.” It’s not just important, it’s crucial.

Hensarling’s goal was to emphasize in an overtly grandiose way the size of the stimulus against the budgets/expenditures of the departments as shown. But it had nothing to do with the base budgets. And stating that the “American people deserve the facts” is disingenuous at best, because these are not facts, they are merely massaged calculations in a faulty comparison, for the purpose of misleading and dramatizing "government over-spending."

My conservative counterpart concludes by knocking the editor Martha Hamilton for not catching “the fact that Hensarling was quite clear that the effects of the stimulus are temporary.” Neither she nor Jacobson couldn’t have noticed that word in the heading, unlike Bryan?  Bryan’s lost his marbles just making that suggestion.