In his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, President Obama outlined a sobering course for bringing the country back to fiscal responsibility.

The president hopes to cut trillion-dollar federal deficits in half within four years by raising taxes on the wealthiest wage earners, reducing spending on the war in Iraq, and cutting wasteful programs, among other steps.

"While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken . . . tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama said.

Putting the government's financial house in order is an essential step toward restoring economic growth.

One hopeful sign is the president's commitment, in the proposed budget summary to be released today, to ban accounting gimmicks that President Bush embraced. It's a refreshing, more honest approach that will give the public a better picture of the crushing deficits that need to be addressed.

For example, Obama will stop the charade of not including in the budget the anticipated cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Bush introduced his last budget in February 2008, he estimated a deficit of $407 billion. But that number was phony because it didn't include the cost of fighting the wars.

In June 2008, Bush signed a $257 billion "supplemental" spending bill that included an extra $162 billion for the wars, plus money for unemployment benefits and aid to Midwest flood victims. The cost of the war remains an annual expense. But not counting the cost served a political purpose and masked the real size of the deficit.

The Bush administration never included a request for war spending in its annual budgets, despite massive yearly increases for the Defense Department. Instead, it used these supplemental or "emergency" requests to Congress to fund the wars — $120 billion in May 2007, $70 billion in late 2006, $82 billion in May 2005, $79 billion in April 2003.

Those totals did add to the national debt. But by hiding these costs in proposed budgets, Bush tried to prevent the country from getting "sticker shock" about the wars. Ending this deceptive practice is overdue.

Obama also will end the trickery of counting the Alternative Minimum Tax as anticipated revenue. Each year the government would submit a budget including the AMT, which is paid by some households earning more than $150,000. But each year Congress grants an exemption, depriving the Treasury of that revenue ($70 billion this year). It was another gimmick that made the deficit look smaller.

These accounting changes and others will "add" about $2.7 trillion to deficits over the next decade. That spending would have occurred anyway, but it had been shielded from view in a sanctioned game of "make believe."

The nation should know the true scope of its financial troubles to get serious about fixing them. Obama's move toward more honest budgeting is a good step.