7.2: Budget Process
Change the budget process. Other Information:
We must also change the budget process itself. From its beginning, its design has enabled, rather than restrained, reckless
spending by giving procedural cover to Members of Congress. The budget process gave us the insidious term “tax expenditure,”
which means that any earnings the government allows a taxpayer to keep through a deduction, exemption, or credit are equivalent
to spending the same amount on some program. It also lumped a broad range of diverse programs under the heading of “entitlement,”
as if veterans’ benefits and welfare checks belong in the same category. Far worse, the process assumes every spending program
will be permanent and every tax cut will be temporary. It refuses to recognize the beneficial budgetary impact of lower tax
rates, and it calls a spending increase a cut if it is less than the rate of inflation. Republican Members of Congress have
repeatedly tried to reform the budget process to make it more transparent and accountable, in particular by voting for a Balanced
Budget Amendment to the Constitution, following the lead of 33 States which have put that restraint into their own constitutions.
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