The Balanced Budget Veto A New Mechanism to Limit Federal Spending (original) (raw)
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Federal Budget Balance: Tonic or Toxin?
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Continuous federal budget deficits and a rising public debt have been presented in terms that have produced mounting dissatisfaction with government. One solution offered to deal with this discontent has been a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget. In a working paper, Charles J. Whalen presents a historical review of balanced budget legislation, including the constitutional amendment proposed in the Republican Contract with America.
American Political Science Review, 1989
Aaron Wildavsky's 1964 book on The Politics of the Budgetary Process deservedly proved to be a classic. Other scholars had observed the decentralized "bottom-up" congressional budget process and saw only disorder. Wildavsky, however, observed that the results of this process seemed quite orderly: Budgets were usually approved on schedule (by June 30 in those years), and total federal spending was roughly equal to tax revenues except during wars and recessions. The major contribution of Wildavsky's "Old" Politics was to explain the mutual expectations, rules, and strategies that led this decentralized process to produce order without direction. In that sense, Wildavsky was the Adam Smith of the federal budgetprocess. In addition, Wildavsky's writing was clear, lively, relatively free of professional jargon, and it reflected a "jeweler's eye" for institutional detail-making the "Old" Politics (through four editions) readable by both students and budget specialists with other professional training. The set of conditions that made the "Old" Politics "work," however, has changed substantially. The more important of these conditions are the following: • The erosion of the consensus for balanced budgets, associated first with the increasing influence of Keynesian economics, and later with the 1981 Reagan initiatives to increase defense spending and reduce tax rates. • The rapid increase in "entitlement" spending, most of which is not subject to annual appropriations. • The rapid increase and subsequent decline in inflation. • The "democratization" of Congress, reflected in the erosion of seniority and the proliferation of subcommittees. • And most important, the erosion of the consensus about what the federal government ought to do, as reflected in increasing disputes about the budget "base."
Policy Sciences, 1996
When this symposium was planned, its subtitle asked if the federal executive budget was a reform whose time had passed. What is, perhaps, most remarkable about the papers written for it is that they almost completely ignore executive budgeting, but focus instead upon the congressional budgetary process. Academics have generally paid much more attention to executive than to legislative budgeting. Most of the writing on budget reform has fixed on executive budgeting. Moreover, empirical investigations of budget outcomes have tended ...