This has got to be one of my favorite quotes in a while:

“The president prefers to tell the truth, rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”

Here’s what happened in a nutshell. Over the last eight years, whenever Bush submitted a proposed budget to Congress, he intentionally hid hundreds of billions of dollars in spending (for things like, say, the Iraq War) as so-called “off-budget” items. This was done with the intent of making Bush’s budgets seem way smaller than they really were.

What Obama has now done is to do away with all that. His budgets will now include all budget spending and will no longer hide countless billions in an “off budget” footnote.

Here’s Steve Benen:

It’s about damn time. The smoke-and-mirrors approach to which we’ve grown accustomed was ridiculous. It was a problem policymakers recognized, but didn’t want to talk about, and had no interest in fixing. It’s not only heartening to see Obama bring some sanity to the process, it will also have key practical consequences — honest budgets lead to better policy making.

Noam Scheiber added that it will be “kinda helpful to have a budget that actually means something when you’re debating public policy,” and added the political upside to using honest budget numbers for a change: “Why not make the long-term deficit look as large as possible at the beginning of your term? Not only can you fairly blame your predecessor at that point; the bigger the deficit looks, the easier it is to show progress, which Obama will need to do as he runs for re-election. To take one example, you can’t claim savings from drawing down in Iraq if you don’t put Iraq spending on the budget in the first place (which Bush mostly didn’t).”