Probably the thing is that income from discont oper. is not sustainable (i.e. is not going to appear eg. next year or in 2 years) so we should not use it to comparisons. Thus, NI from cont oper is used. Below or above the line plays no role here IMO.
Also, net income includes, for example, gains and losses from the sale of PP&E, available-for-sale securities, and so on, and unusual or infrequent items, none of which are from operations.
^This all makes sense for an adjusted EBITDA but, and i dont have my book on me either, doesnt the OP state its jut a work back from NI to get reported EBITDA?
^Yes, but to reconcile from NI you will need to adjust for those non-oper items to get back to EBITDA right? My take on this posts is not valdiity of forecasting using non-oper vs oper (I think we all understand this) but rather semantics of stating to use EBITDA but actually scrubbing ebitda into more of forecasting friendly figure.
If these entries were structured on an income statement it would look like;
EBITDA $20
D/A $4
Interest $5
EBT $11
Taxes $3
Net income-continuing ops $8
Income from non-continuing ops $4
Net Income $12
I think using NI as a workback would give you an inflated figure (EBITDA=$24) because doing so would have accounted for income from non-continuing operations as an operational figure