For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.
Ask David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States and head of GAO. Here's what he said in a Dec 17, 2007 speech at the National Press Club: "If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be…
Here's the bottom line, as reported on Yahoo: The Pentagon cannot account for nearly 15 billion dollars in payments for goods and services in Iraq, according to an internal audit which members of Congress blasted Friday as a "shocking" accountability failure. Why didn't a government accountant catch the problem? Good…
How bad is the economy? In the May issue of Harpers Magazine, Kevin Phillips cuts through the numbers in an article entitled "Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know." The revelations Phillips makes are shocking. The U.S. government has been consciously cooking the books for decades. How…