Over the weekend top Giuliani adivsor Anthony Carbonetti claimed that "it's fiscally responsible to anticipate expenses and prepay them."

That was a reference to Team Rudy's weird practice, while mayor, of prepaying hundreds of thousands of dollars to AMEX to be drawn down against future travel expenses for the mayor and his subordinates -- some Shag Fund-related, some not.

It seems to have been another ploy to hide away big chunks of the Mayor's office's budget.

Has anyone heard of this kind of massive prepayment to a credit card company? In the public sector or private?

Late Update: As I suspected, the consensus of TPM Reader financial planners, accountants and money managers is that prepayment like this, of this large a sum, is basically never justified unless you're getting some sort of discount, which Rudy wasn't. So why were they doing it?