David Obey: “Last year, in order to pretend that the budget resolution provided adequate funding for education, the committee…”

“Last year, in order to pretend that the budget resolution provided adequate funding for education, the committee provided what was known as ``advance funding'' for education to the tune of $2.2 billion. That meant that, for Enron accounting purposes, that $2.2 billion, which was appropriated last year, was not going to count until the next fiscal year, 2004; but now, guess what. Now we are at the end of fiscal 2003. So nobody is watching what happens to the deficit for 2003 anymore. So what happens instead is that now we get a double reverse because this proposal, this resolution today contains a gimmick that can only be labeled ``Enron accounting 1A'' because what this resolution does now is to move that $2.2 billion back to fiscal 2003. So you have to play the shell game when they are looking at what happened in 2003, slip the money into the fiscal 2004 budget, and then when people take their eyes off 2003 and now focus on 2004, then you slip the same money into 2003. Great gimmick. It technically works, but if the SEC were supervising this, I think they would have the same kind of questions about our bookkeeping that we have had about Enron.”