THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE NEW YORK
ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

NEW YORK has been more far-sighted than most of the states in this: it has assumed that it would grow; it has assumed that its political machinery would become obsolete would need a periodical overhauling to adapt it to the changing needs of the people. It has been made the duty of state officers to arrange for a meeting of a convention of delegates especially chosen for the purpose of coming together once in twenty years to look over the public service plant and to draw up plans and specifications for additions and betterments.

In 1904 the last constitution was enacted. In November last new delegates were elected. Next April is appointed for the convention, following which the draft of the new constitution will be submitted to the people.

The first meeting of the New York Academy of Political Science after the November election was given up entirely to this subject. There were four sessions at each of which several important phases of the state's needs for change in its foundamental law were discussed-the purpose being to focus public attention and enlist the many agencies representing special interests in a plan of broad coöperation for bringing the best thought of citizens before the convention. The papers read and addresses made before the members of the Academy will constitute two volumes of the materials which will be laid before the delegates of the state constitutional convention, of which Judge Morgan J. O'Brien is chairman. As the papers on budget proposals have a direct bearing on the January issue of Municipal Research, they are reprinted in this form.

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A STATE BUDGET

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CONSTRUCTIVE PROPOSALS TO BE SUBMITTED to the STATE

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CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

FREDERICK A. CLEVELAND

Director, Bureau of Municipal Research

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N 1912 President Taft, by special message, submitted to Congress a definite budget plan for the management of national finances." Shortly before the end of his administration he sent a second message, urging that next year's plans and next year's finances be taken up as a whole, and in a manner to locate and define responsibilty for proposals involving the raising and spending of public money. This suggestion was presented to Congress as an alternative to having financial measures split up and virtually decided by one or another of some twenty unrelated congressional committees, and forcing the administration later to patch together enactments like a crazy-quilt after official requests had been dragged over the crooked and thorny paths of legislative compromise. These two efforts to obtain the coöperation of Congress in establishing a budget procedure stand out in four years of President Taft's official life as efforts which received universal approval; even in the face of a bitterly partisan and personal campaign, editorial opinion of all political faiths joined in support of his proposal. Public opinion has reacted in the same way when state and municipal budgets have been proposed. The idea of having some way of presenting a financial plan in a form which can be understood appeals to everyone. Notwithstanding this fact, we are a budgetless people. In the constitutional sense the federal government has no budget; state governments are without budgets; most of our municipalities are without budgets.

This is not because we have not been keenly alive to a need for the orderly consideration of public business; but because public men have not had clearly before them what a budget is and its relation to constitutional government. In the United States, the estimates and requests for appropriations are usually called the budget. This very loose use of the term could not obtain if we had an effective budget procedure. Imagine one attempting to give such a meaning to the term budget" in England, for example, where the departmental estimates of expenditures are submitted to Parliament at a different time and are considered by a different committee than the budget.

Here in America, again, the appropriation bill not infrequently is called the budget. Such is the practice in New York city. But in governments where budgets are made a part of the machinery of public business the appropriation bill could not be so mistaken; often the appropriation items are all voted before the budget is sent in. The British practice is this: Early in each annual session the estimates are submitted to the House of Commons, which, upon hearing them, sits as a committee of the whole house, known as the committee of supply. Each department presents its estimates in a huge quarto volume with minute entries of moneys wanted for the following year. Condensed synopses of these quartos are made with the object of rendering clear the policy back of the requests for money. Any member may ask what pertinent questions he pleases of the minister who is presenting the departmental estimates, so that no request need be passed by without full explanation. After the statement has been completed to the satisfaction of the committee, a vote is taken. But the votes are only the first steps in Parliament's annual supervision of the public finances. In order to consider the means by which money is to be raised to meet the expenditures sanctioned by the committee on supply, the House resolves itself into a committee of the whole, under the name of committee of ways and means. It is to this committee that the Chancellor of the Exchequer submits his budget.1

What is a Budget?

So far we have spoken on what a budget is not. Having in mind this confusion of ideas, as well as the purpose of the Academy in bringing the subject before the constitutional convention, would it not be well, even at the risk of tedium, to go over some of the commonplaces descriptive of what a budget is? England is said to be the mother of budgets. There the budget idea was incorporated in its most fundamental constitutional document-Magna Charta. There a settled budget practice long antedated the settled use of the name. The word budget was introduced from the French, but the constitutional principle to which it applies was English. Thus we find that Major General Balfour, in a paper read before the Statistical Society of London, in 1866, said:

I use the word "budget" in the sense attached to it by M. le Marquis d'Audiffret, an author who appears to be a good authority on financial questions. Monsieur d'Audiffret says the word budget" or "bouge" or bougette," according to Pesquier and ancient writers, as well as in the old language of Rabelais, is derived from the Latin word bulga, become Gallic, which expresses a bag, a pocket, a purse. England has applied it to the great leather bag which for a long time contained the documents presented to Parliament to explain the resources and the wants of the country. This new interpretation has also been adopted in our language in imitatation of the forms and expressions of the constitutional idioms of Great Britain, and only appeared for the first time in the Acts of the French Government, in the decrees of the consuls, in the interval between the month of August 1802, and the month of April 1803, in which this term budget replaced the former estimate of receipts and expenditures.1 2

Whatever else a budget is or is not, it must have these essentials: (1) It must be a definite plan or proposal for financing the present and future needs of the state; and (2) it must be