The Budget Puzzle: Understanding Federal Spending

In the United States, the size and composition of the federal budget is arguably the most important single issue of the 1990s, yet most debates and commentaries on the subject are largely uninformed. Most people are distressed at the enormous size of the federal deficit and perplexed because highly touted plans and agreements to bring the deficit down result in an even higher deficit. This book comprises a series of essays about the federal budget - how and why it has grown so large, why most ‘deficit reduction’ measures are either shams or predestined to fail and why understanding budget issues is so difficult. The authors offer a new perspective, a microbudgeting approach, which requires examining in detail how the federal government makes its budget decisions. Individual essays focus on the changing Congressional budget processes since World War II, origins, uses and abuses of budget baselines and the myth of Reagan’s budget reductions.