ABSTRACT
By the late 1970s and early 1980s budgeting got to be so much fun it was done several times a year, for no budget lasted more than a few months. Spending reforms after the Second World War were concerned with improving the process of calculation, not limiting total spending. Financial turbulence has brought about the first stirrings of a different budget strategy, a strategy of beginning with limits on total spending. When improvement in budgetary practices did begin to slow down, that was only because the norms established by then—norms of annualarity, comprehensiveness, and balance—epitomized the best possible arrangements under the circumstances. There is a supportive relationship between the classical budgetary norms, so that a decline in one causes a contraction in the applicability of the others. The irony of contemporary budgetary reform is that radical changes are being advocated in order to bring back the traditional norms of budgeting.
