Handbook of Public Budgeting and Fiscal Politics

A government always has less money than its purposes require. The arithmetic is the easy part. The hard
question, and the one this handbook is built around, is how a government decides which purposes get funded,
and why the answer so often turns out to have been settled before anyone voted.
Two kinds of books exist on this subject, and neither is enough on its own. Technical treatments explain
classifications, forecasts, and appropriation mechanics as though budgeting were a procedure a skilled analyst
could simply perform correctly. Political treatments explain that budgets are contests among interests, and leave
the machinery looking like decoration. Practitioners live in the space between: the budget officer who has to
explain why an appropriated program never happened, the analyst who notices that four consecutive balanced
budgets are a pattern, the council member who cannot find out what a new facility will cost to operate once it
opens.
This handbook takes budgeting seriously as both. Its organizing claim is that public budgeting is an allocation
contest between institutions, conducted under rules that determine who must persuade whom, and that the
rules themselves are frequently the decisive factor. Its recurring finding is that a great deal of public allocation
has migrated out of the process designed to allocate publicly into preferences in the revenue system, dedicated
funds, off-budget entities, long-term commitments, and deferrals, each legitimate on its own while the aggregate
belongs to nobody.
>- Use the vocabulary of spending authority precisely, and label any fiscal figure by year, status, and universe.
- Trace an appropriation through execution, where a second allocation quietly takes place.
- Recognize the devices that move allocation out of view, and read a proposal that uses one.
- Read a government's debt position, capital commitments, and rigidity for what they oblige future budgets to do.
- Identify fiscal stress early, while options remain open, rather than at the stage where they have closed.
- Weigh claims about limits, transparency, and development incentives against what the research actually
>Inside: legal authority over public money; the cycle and its actors; the theories that explain why budgets come
out as they do; reform waves and what survived them; execution, control, and the contest over appropriated
money; capital decisions and long-term commitment; revenue politics, salience, and limitation; spending
conducted through the revenue system; deficits, debt, and credit; relations among levels of government; stress
>Who it is for: graduate students in public administration and public policy, legislative and executive budget
analysts, finance directors, agency managers, elected officials, and instructors who need a text that treats
mechanism and politics as one subject.
Begin where the decisions are actually made, and build the working knowledge to read a budget, follow the
money after enactment, and recognize the rules that will settle an argument before it starts.