Balanced Budgets And American Politics

A topical issue but hardly a new one, the concern for balancing the federal budget has been a perennial source of conflict in American political life. In Balanced Budgets and American Politics, James Savage explores the causes and development of the nation's preoccupation with this issue. Savage argues that the American fascination with the idea of balancing the federal budget is deeply rooted and reflects more than a contemporary concern about interest rates, inflation, or even the outcome of recent budget battles. His analysis demonstrates the considerable influence that the principle budget balancing has had on politics and public policy from 1690 through Ronald Reagan's first term as president.

When the first edition of Why Budgets Matter was published in 2003, the federal budget had fallen back into deficit. At the time, fairly modest changes in taxes and spending would have ensured that deficits and debt would remain at tolerable levels. Instead, the disconnect between taxes and spending that had plagued the United States since the 1960s grew even greater. A near-catastrophic economic collapse beginning in December 2007 then magnified the fiscal consequences of irresponsible policy choices. This new edition examines how and why the balanced-budget equilibrium of the 1990s was destabilized in the 2000s. It also places this latest partisan battle over the size of government in historical perspective by exploring its connection to earlier budget policy eras.

From the clashes between Federalists and Republicans in the 1790s until today, partisan battles over taxing, spending, and public debt have shaped American political development. These battles were formerly constrained by fiscal norms that mandated balanced budgets and low debt. In his Farewell Address, President George Washington counseled the nation to "cherish public credit" by using "it as sparingly as possible". In the 1980s, however, tax cuts and spending increases created large structural deficits and much higher debt levels. With only a brief interruption in the late 1990s, deficit politics has been a mainstay ever since. Over this period, the Republican Party has passed large tax cuts but failed to retrench the large entitlement programs that continue to raise spending. Likewise, the Democratic Party has expanded the domestic role of government but has abandoned the broad-based taxation it supported in the 1990s. Funding their domestic agenda with matching revenues is now as unappealing for Democrats as entitlement cutbacks are for Republicans, contributing to the current stalemate of Republican tax policy, Democratic spending policy, and soaring deficits and debt. The economic risks this entails are serious, yet an end to the era of deficit politics is nowhere in sight.

Aaron Wildavsky's greatest concern, as expressed in his writings, is how people manage to live together. This concern may at first appear to have little to do with the study of budgeting, but for Wildavsky budgeting made living together possible. Indeed, as he argues here, if you cannot budget, you cannot govern. Budgeting and Governing gathers in one place a mass of material that otherwise would be lost in a wilderness of journals and edited volumes. With few exceptions, Wildavsky chose the articles in this collection. They are organized largely chronologically so that the reader can trace the progression of his thought which moved from studies of the American federal government, through comparative work, and on to placing budgeting within a broader theory of political culture. Wildavsky wrote about budgeting because in his words, "when a process involves power, authority, culture, consensus, and conflict, it captures a great deal of national political life." Wildavsky was interested in budgeting because of what it could tell us about the classic questions of politics: who gets what, how, and why? His earlier analyses focus narrowly on budgeting personnel and agency actors in answering these questions, while in his later work the contending actors become sub-cultural types. To Wildavsky politics was about finding terms for living together in spite of ideological differences. Budgetary incrementalism helped to manage this otherwise unmanageable task. He thought synoptic budgeting and all related reforms would increase disagreement and raise the stakes, and so were unwise. Analysis had to serve politics, not try to displace it. Aaron Wildavsky is considered one of the most innovative and prolific scholars in the field of political research in our time. He was the author most recently of Culture and Social Theory and Federalism and Political Culture, as well as Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership (with Richard Ellis), The Beleaguered Presidency, and Craftways: On the Organization of Scholarly Work, all available from Transaction. Brendon Swedlow is a visiting processor in the political science department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Joseph White is an associate professor in the Department of Health Systems Management at Tulane University Medical Center. "...this collection of essays is to show the development of the late Wildavsky's ideas on budgeting from the beginning of his career to the end....Recommended for research libraries and gradute students in public administration."-Choice "Brendow Swedloe and Transaction Press have rendered policy scholars, budget specialists, and public managers a tremendous service by pulling together this posthumous collection of Aaron Wildavsky's writings on the vital, it often politically tense, relationship between budgeting and governing."--Journal of Policy Analysis and Management