Undoing Bush's financially engineered budgets

Any analytical citizen would be distraught at the financial engineering during Bush's administration- especially in the cooking up of federal budgets.
Now it is Obama who has to present his first budget. A report in NYT outlines the proposed budget, which will be revealed on Thursday.

List of key items:

• Mr. Obama will propose cutting a variety of programs, including the Medicare Advantage subsidies for insurance companies that cover seniors who can otherwise acquire health coverage directly from the government.
  
• Another target is spending on private contractors, especially for defense, which spiked during the Bush administration. GWB just privatized the war, showering huge amounts of federal money on private firms. This is one of the most unethical acts of the previous administration.
• Obama will scale back some promises, including his proposal to double money for foreign aid.
• Obama will include war costs in the budget; Mr. Bush did not, and instead sought supplemental money from Congress each year. GWB went around the accounting system by seeking supplemental money that was not part of the regular budget, thus making his budget deficit appear smaller than it really was.
  
• Mr. Obama also will not count savings from laws that establish lower Medicare payments for doctors and expand the alternative minimum tax to hit more taxpayers — both of which Mr. Bush and Congress routinely took credit for, while knowing they would later waive the laws to raise doctors’ payments and limit the reach of the tax.
  
• “The president believes there are essentially three areas that have to move forward even as we pare back elsewhere — health care, energy and education,” said David Axelrod, his senior adviser. “These are the bulwark of a strong economy moving forward.” While some people have predicted that Mr. Obama would have to shelve his priorities given rising deficits, his determination to proceed, especially on health care, reflects his economic advisers’ conviction that the government cannot control its finances without reforming health care. The ballooning cost of health care, and thus Medicare and Medicaid, is the biggest factor behind projections of unsustainable deficits in coming decades.
• Mr. Obama will suggest in his budget that expanding health coverage to the more than 46 million uninsured can be done without adding to the deficit, both by making cost-saving changes in the delivery of care and by raising revenues. Advisers declined to identify the tax source.

While there is a LONG way to go in reforming the grossly unethical culture in Washington, this is a step in the right direction. I hope Obama keeps pushing the envelope in the reform process.