TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Keith Hennessey analyzes President Obama’s rhetoric that the deficit plan he proposed in April 2011 would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion. Then, Obama compared his plan to Representative Paul Ryan’s plan and the Simpson-Bowles Commission proposal, which both would cut the deficit by $4 trillion over a decade, which is the traditional time period used for these kinds of plans.

Obama’s plan, however, is to cut $4 trillion over 12 years. According to Hennessey’s analysis, Obama’s would only cut $2.8 trillion over a decade. A White House spokeswoman claimed $2.9 trillion in April 2011, so that’s accurate.

The problem here is that when speaking about the deficit on a campaign stop on September 9th, Obama mentions the $4 trillion headline figure, but forgot to mention that it’s over 12 years rather than the traditional 10. That’s fairly terrible, because it’s highly misleading; it’s like comparing the headline price of two cell phone plans that are over a different length of time. But as Hennessey points out, this isn’t an accident. Hennessey quotes from Bob Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics:

Obama was getting fired up as he worked through what to say and how to say it. He wanted a $ 4 trillion deficit plan too, but the cuts were too severe. The progressive and liberal base would be deeply distressed.
…
Sperling suggested an old trick from the Clinton years: Stick with the $ 4 trillion— that was easy to understand— but instead of projecting it over the traditional 10 years, do it over 12. No one would really notice. Few would do the math. By stretching the plan out and loading most of the cuts into its final years, the early cuts were substantially smaller.

Lovely. For someone who said he was going to make government more open and transparent, that’s rather, um, cynical.