ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the ways in which struggles around the control of the budget have developed in recent years and the ways in which these struggles impair the fiscal capacity of the system and potentially threaten the capacity of the system to produce surplus. It argues that the fiscal crisis is exacerbated by the private appropriation of state power for particularistic ends. The accumulation of social capital and social expenses is a highly irrational process from the standpoint of administrative coherence, fiscal stability, and potentially profitable private capital accumulation. The main concerns of fiscal politics are to discover the principles governing the volume and allocation of state finances and expenditures and the distribution of the tax burden among various economic classes. The socialization of costs and private appropriation of profits creates a fiscal crisis, or "structural gap", between state expenditures and state revenues.