Actually, the federal budget does, too. We need to institute zero-based budgeting. But neither is likely to happen, given the nature of the interests involved, and their ability to donate to campaign coffers.
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We can’t even get sheeple to consider doing that on a new planet (assuming other conditions allowed.) With rare exception, we’ve become a nation of wimps. Our founders would be sad.
if you love Zero Based Budgeting, then you should Love Jimmy Carter, he tried to implement this at the federal level after doing it in Georgia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_budgeting
I think we’d “love” a politician whose attempts to do worthwhile things weren’t so feckless and outnumbered by his stupid and arrogant attempts.
Ideology trumps methodology, but methods can be useful. Zero based is saying that no item is open ended. The fact is some items should be relatively open ended if you have an open ended situation. Also, budgets don’t have to just go up, contrary to political thinking, down is a really good direction for budgets when it can be done. Zero is even better in many cases.
In practice, departments will ask for much more than they want simple because they know they will not get it but will be very happy with what they do end up getting because it’s almost always more than they really wanted (if not, they just get even more outrageous in their next request.) This is insane, but you would never get those doing it to admit it. It seems perfectly rational to them mainly because IT’S NOT THEIR MONEY.
Zero based doesn’t really address this. These departments would simply do more of the same. They really don’t work that hard to begin with.
What we need is leadership that really means to clean house. Then method doesn’t really matter much. You don’t need zero base to review everything.
Baseline budgeting wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t assume an automatic increase year over year so spending more than last year can still be considered a cut. Without that fiction we’d eventually get a balanced budget on continuing resolutions. But regular review to verify budget line items are still justified is still needed.