"Negotiators seeking to carve trillions of dollars from the deficit are facing temptation to use iffy assumptions and outright gimmickry to exaggerate the size of spending cuts to accompany any increase in the government's ability to borrow to stay afloat.
With both sides reluctant to abandon long-held positions — Republicans are against tax increases, Democrats oppose cutting benefit programs like Medicare — those watching the talks being led by Vice President Joe Biden are on the lookout for a familiar set of accounting tricks.
Little wonder. Both already have employed such tricks earlier this year in making their budgets appear leaner than they really are.
The most obvious options available to negotiators are to claim inflated savings from troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and to have budget savings pile up over 12 years or so rather than the 10 years that is typical when drafting budgets.
And there's every possibility that the negotiations will generate unrealistic assumptions about cuts to domestic agencies and the Pentagon over the coming decade — and the real possibility of a deal that would lack enforcement teeth.
Perhaps the most obvious gimmick would be to claim the ongoing drawdown from the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan as budget savings.
Already this year, both President Barack Obama and House Republicans have claimed in their budgets more than $1 trillion in savings by taking advantage of the peculiar way government scorekeepers project war costs and by lowballing projected costs in future years.
Under the rules followed by the Congressional Budget Office, the agency currently projects war spending to grow with inflation even as troop drawdowns are ongoing. That means House Republicans could claim more than $1 trillion in savings by cutting the budget for war costs to $65 billion for 2014 and $50 billion a year shortly thereafter"............READ MORE
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