Budgets Used to Be About Fiscal Control. Not Anymore

Presidential budget requests are rarely to be taken seriously. Congress typically ignores them and grinds out changes in spending and taxes according to its own priorities, in its own good time. Yet even by this standard, the White House’s budget for the next fiscal year is disappointing. Rather than merely failing to solve the country’s rapidly worsening fiscal problems, it chooses to ignore them entirely while advocating an enormous increase in defense spending.

The administration doesn’t actually bother to project deficits and public debt over the next decade. You have to estimate them from spending requests for the coming year and economic assumptions set out in the budget’s supporting “analytical perspectives.”