I agree with you. The politicians call "baseline budgeting" zero when it really already has increases built in. Then they decry as "cuts" when the increase isn't as much as originally projected - and show graphs that indicate that it is a cut, but it is only a cut to what they really wanted, it is still an increase to the previous period.

So too local municipalities that spend all their operating budgets, then steal from their capital budgets and ask the voters for bonding to fill in on incompetent budgets and fiscal foolishness.

And don't get me started on the "SS Lock Box." A concept so blatantly false that any politician that speaks of same ought to be flogged. The excess funds that were collected in the past were spent long ago and nothing exists now but soon to be worthless IOU's. Who's going to pay back those IOU's? Our children. But to make the "pain" to the gov't less painful, they'll inflate the money, so that the real value of the IOU's will be next to nothing.