Federal Fiscal Problems are Structural and Immune to Repairs of Budgeting Processes

摘要

In this volume, Philip Joyce makes an important contribution to our understanding of the interaction of theory and practice in federal budgeting. His is a tale of caution about our ability to improve federal budgetary decision making through process reforms. After recounting (and usefully documenting) this generation's efforts to increase the information available to policymakers to make budgetary decisions, he concludes that the actual process is still as much of a mess as it has always been, and that the process reforms adopted have done little more than enable recalcitrant politicians to "hide behind science" even while doing ever-increasing violence to the federal fisc.