Abstract
Conflict and ambiguity were built into the budget system from the beginning, requiring cooperation between equal branches constantly vying for power. The history of the budget process reflects a combination of how these branches have dealt with electoral politics as well as economic policy. When the budget process has been successful its structure does not have a material effect on the outcomes. However, it has not been very effective in helping to resolve fundamental disagreements about policy or politics. This problem has become heightened over time as the budget process has been asked to reflect more disputed matters. The introduction also examines the structure of the budget system in early America, including its weaknesses for managing public credit and the foundations for the new Constitution.
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Notes
- 1.
Henry Shuman, Politics and the Budget: The Struggle Between the President and the Congress (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984). Shuman offers a good summary of more recent history and the inherent political power struggles between the president, Congress, and other institutions involved with the budget process.
- 2.
Aaron Wildavsky, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1964). Many others have analyzed the connection between politics and the budget, including Rubin (2013), Sharkansky (1969) Fisher (2009), Ippolito (2012), and Witte (1985). Wildavsky (1975) finds that both political and economic factors are important for determining domestic agency budgets. Koven (1988) suggests that ideology affects budgeting decisions which can create either a system of political accountability or a budget derived based on “emotion and passion” thus threatening credibility.
- 3.
David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1986).
- 4.
Aaron Wildavsky, The Politics of the Budgetary Process (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1964); Charles Lindblom, “The science of ‘muddling through’,” Public Administration Review 19, (1959).
- 5.
Allen Schick, Congress and Money: Budgeting, Spending, and Taxing (Washington, DC: The Urban Institute, 1980); Charles H. Stewart, III, Budget Reform Politics: The Design of the Appropriations Process in the House of Representatives (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- 6.
Oliver Blanchard, “Public Debt and Low Interest Rates,” American Economic Review 109, no. 4 (2019): 1197–1229.
- 7.
Alberto Alesina, Carlo A. Favero, and Francesco Giavazzi, “What Do We Know about the Effects of Austerity?” AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association (2018): 524–530; Francesco Giavazzi and Marco Pagano, “Can Sever Fiscal Contractions be Expansionary? Tales of Two Small European Countries,” NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1990, Volume 5, by Oliver Jean Blanchard and Stanley Fischer (1990): 75–122.
- 8.
John Neville Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1917).
- 9.
Similar to LeLoup (1983) and others, this book does not imply that incrementalism is preferable as a normative strategy over a comprehensive approach to the federal budget.
- 10.
Alice M. Rivlin, “Reform of the Budget Process,” The American Economic Review : Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association 74, no. 2 (1984): 133–137.
- 11.
Courtenary Ilbert, Parliament : Its History, Constitution , and Practice, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948); K.C. Wheare, Government by Committee (London: Oxford University Press, 1955); Kenneth Bradshaw and David Pring, Parliament and Congress (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1972).
- 12.
S.J. Niefield, “The Development of the Budgetary Systems of the United States,” FinanzArchiv/Public Finance Analysis 13, no. 4 (1951/1952): 606–614.
- 13.
Jack P. Greene, “Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of Legislative Behavior in the British Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 75, no. 2 (1969): 337–360.
- 14.
David R. Kennon and M. Rebecca Rogers, The Committee on Ways and Means : A Bicentennial History, 1789–1989 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989).
- 15.
Albert S. Bolles, Financial History of the United States from 1774 to 1789, Vol. I (New York, NY: Augustus M. Kelly Publishers, 1969).
- 16.
For more on American debt during the early period and European capital markets, see Perkins (1994).
- 17.
James Madison to Edmund Randolph, September 16–17, 1782, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 5, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 126–130.
- 18.
Ibid. see note 11.
- 19.
Douglas A. Irwin, “Revenue or Reciprocity? Founding Feuds Over Early U.S. Trade Policy,” in Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s by Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
- 20.
John Adams, The Adams Papers: Papers of John Adams, vol. 15, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert F. Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Mary T. Claffey, and Karen N. Barzilay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010): 300–301.
- 21.
The Philadelphia Journal and Weekly Advertiser, September 17, 1783.
- 22.
Thomas Jefferson to Robert Morris – with Draft of Circulation Letter to the States, March 30, 1784, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 53–56.
- 23.
George Washington to James Warren, October 7, 1785, in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 3, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 298–301.
- 24.
Edmund Pendleton to James Madison, December 9, 1786, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 9, ed. Robert A. Rutland and William M. E. Rachal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 201–204.
- 25.
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, May 3, 1788, in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 11, ed. Robert A. Rutland and Charles F. Hobson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 33–38.
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Winfree, P. (2019). Introduction. In: A History (and Future) of the Budget Process in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30959-6_1
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