About a month ago, I noticed some, err, creative accounting on the part of John McCain's highly respected economic adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin. In essence, Holtz-Eakin demanded that folks stopped calculating the extension of the Bush tax cuts and elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax in the McCain tax plan, even though both the Bush cuts and the AMT reforms are set to expire, and McCain not only supports, but would have to sign into law, their preservation. Holtz-Eakin, however, says that since Bush started these policies, they're his fault, and shouldn't be counted as part of McCain's ledger. Seemed dodgy to me, but economists seem to love the guy, so maybe I was missing something. Not so. Today, Paul Krugman notices the same sleight-of-hand, and gets even shriller about it than I did. Accounting sure is fun if you don't have to pay for anything that happened before you took over the books!
