Text 1. Passing the Congressional Budget

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 339.

UNIT 6: BUDGET PASSING. BUDGET REFORMS

DISCUSSION: Arguing government's investment in hi-tech realm

Possible characters:

1. Traditional economy supporters.

2. Hi-tech zealots.

3. People from the Office of Management and Budget.

4. People from Microsoft.

5. Hi-tech investors, who suffered during the recession.

6. Independent analysts.

7.People from the government.

Congress must approve the budget. That process is a creaky conglomeration of traditional procedures overlaid with structural reforms from the 1970s, external constraints in the 1980s, and hasty changes introduced by the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act. Especially in recent years the process has proved inadequate to the task of producing a budget according to Congress's own timetable.

The traditional procedure: the committee structure. Traditionally, the tasks of budget making were divided among a number of committees—a process that has been retained. There are three types of committees involved in budgeting:

Tax committeesare responsible for raising the revenues to run the government. The Ways and Means Committee in the House and the Finance Committee in the Senate consider all proposals for taxes, tariffs, and other receipts contained in the president's budget.

Authorization committees(such as the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee) have jurisdiction over particular legislative subjects. The House has about twenty committees that can authorize spending, and the Senate about fifteen. Each one pores over the portions of the budget that pertain to its area of responsibility. In recent years, however, power has shifted from the authorization committees to the appropriations committees.

Appropriations committeesdecide which of the programs approved by the authorization committees will actually be funded (that is, given money to spend). For example, the House Armed Services Committee might decide to build a new line of tanks for the army and even get its decision enacted into law. But the tanks will never be built unless funds are appropriated for that purpose by the appropriations committees. Thirteen distinct appropriation bills are supposed to be enacted each year to fund the nation's spending.

Two major problems are inherent in a budgeting process that involves three distinct kinds of congressional committees. First, the two-step spending process (first authorization, then appropriation] is complex; it offers wonderful opportunities for interest groups to get into the budgeting act. Second, because one group of legislators in each house plans for revenues and many other groups plan for spending, no one is responsible for the budget as a whole. In the 1970s, Congress added a new committee structure that combats the pluralist politics inherent in the old procedures and allows budget choices to be made in a more majoritarian manner, by votes in both chambers.

(from “The Challenge of Democracy”)

Tasks:

do the phonetic reading and written literary translation of the third, the forth and the sixth passages;

put 6 questions to the text;

give the summary of the text;

retell the text as if you were:

1) a representative of a tax committee;

2) a representative of an authorization committee;

3)a representative of an appropriation committee.