ABSTRACT
The president's budget is made in private, the congressional budget in public. The last decade has revealed certain imperfections in the congressional political arena. Members of Congress who vote for spending proposals find themselves unhappy with the resulting totals or the tax rates related to them. The near-universal practice of incrementalism in budgeting has been attacked as mindless and irrational—mindless because most of the budget is not subject to scrutiny, and irrational because the full range of relevant comparisons is deliberately excluded from view. Of the rich nations of the world, the British have in the Public Expenditure Survey Committee the only major innovation in budgeting practice that has proven successful. Spending agencies would enjoy the gain of increased stability in their existing programs through base expenditures, and suffer the cost of more tightly constrained competition for the annual increment.
