Comments on Anderson's ch 5

As always, unless otherwise noted, references to Anderson are to his 2011 7th edition assigned as a text for this course.

You know the Golden Rule?  He who has the gold rules.  Love doesn’t make the world go ‘round.  Money does. Government programs of goods and services can only be provided if there is money to pay for them, and even basic government operations (US diplomatic operations, adoption and implementation of government regulations) can only be carried out if there are funds to pay staff and maintain offices.

The chapter on budgeting again illustrates the value of institutionalism (Anderson: 23-25) in understanding the policy process.  Organizations (the Congressional Budget Office, the Budget Committee, the Office of Management and Budget) formal rules and procedures (the constitutional power of the veto without a line-item veto, reprogramming authority, the congressional division of budgeting among authorizing, Appropriations, and Budget committees), and informal practices (deference to Appropriations subcommittees, the bounded rationality of incremental budgeting) all matter for public policy outcomes.

Budgets and political strategy

There is an extensive body of research trying to explain why some governments are bigger in terms of the share of Gross Domestic Product they consume than others and why the government share of the economy has tended to increase cross-nationally.  (The United States is, among advanced industrial states, a relatively small government; see the comparative data on government revenue as a share of the total economy under “Exhibits” at BB’s Course Documents.)  Without going into all of this, for this course in policymaking there is one provocative argument that is worth considering.  In an article “Why government grows (and grows) in a democracy, Meltzer and Richard (1978) note that there is an asymmetry between political and economic power in democratic polities.  In democracies, voting power is distributed more equally than economic power (each voter has one vote, while a small number of people control much more wealth than do the remaining majority).  As a result, the large number of poor people will use their large number of votes to raise taxes on the relatively small number of wealthier people who have relatively few votes to use in defense.  As a counter to Meltzer and Richard, note that there are important political resources other than troops (money, information, the ability to disrupt, legitimacy, and skill) that are used to win in policy conflicts. The Meltzer and Richard article is provocative, not necessarily empirically supported.

The Wimpy factor.  The discussion of budgeting provides a good opportunity to raise the question of timing.  Rational politicians will try to move benefits forward in time and push costs back.  Moreover, as  can be seen by periodic crises in entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, short-term fixes, which typically don’t involve politically unpalatable policy changes, are preferred to deeper solutions.  Wimpy?

As we shall see, budgeting seriously implicates policy implementation and policy evaluation.  The adequacy of budgets determine how completely programs can be implemented and budgetary stipulations can influence how they are implemented.  Rising government expenditures stimulated the demands for evaluating policy effectiveness, and concerns about continued budgetary support make unfavorable program evaluations a political problem.