"Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets"

This quote by Thomas Sowell recommends that when federal governments are needed to balance their budget plans, they are most likely to utilize innovative accounting strategies to make it appear that their budget plans are well balanced, instead of in fact having a balanced spending plan. This suggests that federal governments might be more focused on meeting the requirement of a well balanced budget than in fact achieving one. This could be due to the truth that governments may be more worried with the look of a balanced spending plan than the reality of it. This quote suggests that governments may be more focused on meeting the requirement of a well balanced budget plan than really achieving one, and that this requirement may result in imaginative accounting methods rather than genuine spending plan balancing.