[Editor’s Note: Here’s a tale of budgeting that may sound familiar. Many thanks to guest blogger Rick Albertson for sharing it with us.]

It’s that time of year again, when legislators wrangle back and forth about how the country is going to spend its money. Essential budget bills are held up in Congress while every item gets pushed and prodded, amendments and earmarks are inserted and removed, supplemental funding clauses added and subtracted, and approximately-acceptable compromises are worked out in the House and Senate. Then they are sent upstream to the legislative branch, where the president gets to exercise his power of the pen over line items before the annual budget is finally passed into law.

This year the budgeting process is particularly critical, with military funding and financial reforms at the top of everybody’s hot list. The legislative branch knows there’s a great deal at stake this time, and the executive branch is all set to go toe-to-toe with the lawmakers when it comes down to who gets money for what. Because of the key issues involved, the press and the voters are watching Washington’s every move with unusually intense interest this year as well.

Bismarck’s statement about laws and sausages is true at any time, but it’s truer than ever at times like this when such huge sums of money are involved. The public is expecting to get plenty of steak as well as sizzle for its hard-earned tax dollars. But when the process finally grinds out a ton of sausage instead, though, the public ends up scratching its collective head and asking “Huh? How did that happen?” instead.

Appropriations bills, and for that matter any other kind of bills, are incredibly complicated documents by the time they ever come up for a vote. Even the simplest, most obvious proposal gets bogged down in subclauses and disquisitions and legal caveats and so on before it ever gets introduced, and then they all get even more weighted down with amendments and exceptions and corollary clauses and such before they ever reach the floor. The bigger the bill, the more barnacles that it’s encrusted with before it ever even leaves the dock.

That’s why it’s equally inaccurate to make oversimplified statements like “Congressman X voted against tax cuts for the middle class” and “Representative Y voted to spend billions on selfish pork-barrel projects” and “Senator Z voted not to fund our brave troops fighting overseas.” The devil is in the details, and boy howdy, are there ever a devilish bunch of details to deal with whenever we look at the legislative process. So let’s see if we can’t use a simpler example to address this topic instead:

Let’s say that Joe and Jane Citizen have two kids, Jody and Jill Citizen. It’s time for Jody and Jill to go back to school in the fall. They need all kinds of stuff for the new school year—notebooks and pencils and backpacks, shoes and shirts and skirts, soccer balls and gymnastics outfits, you know the drill. That’s a lot of stuff. How much is it going to cost, and who’s going to pay for it, and how?

So Joe and Jane have to sit down and work out all the details before they can even start to shop for the kids’ school needs. How much do they have to spend? They add up what’s left in their paychecks every month after taxes, SSI, etc. They balance that number out against what it costs to pay the mortgage every month, the utilities, the car and health insurance, the groceries, etc. Then they can see what they have left to work with for the kids’ back-to-school stuff. <!-more-> So then Joe and Jane have to sit down and figure out what the kids’ stuff is actually going to cost this year. The odds are pretty good that what they have to work with is less than what it’ll cost to get the kids all the stuff they need, or at least all the stuff they want. This is when it starts getting messy, because the devil is in the details.

Joe and Jane both agree that to make this work, they’ll have to cut expenses wherever they possibly can. So they forget about putting money into the kids’ college fund again this year, because that’s a laudable goal but they need to focus on what the kids need for school right here, right now. Some things are pretty much a given: books are books, backpacks are backpacks, and ya gotta have ‘em, so that’s that. But in the real world, shoes aren’t always shoes, and all that other stuff isn’t always a given either.

So Joe says, “Well, I know that Jody has to have new shoes, but I don’t think he really has to have the hundred-dollar sneakers he’s asking for.” And then Jane says, “Well, I know that Jill’s gymnastics classes aren’t absolutely necessary, but they really make her happy and besides, the personal discipline she’s learning in those gymnastics classes is one reason her grades went up last year.”

So Joe and Jane keep sitting down and they keep figuring it out until they come up with something that pretty much works, more or less. Jody does get his new shoes, but he doesn’t get the hundred-dollar sneakers. Jill does get to take gymnastics classes again this year, but she won’t get to go to computer camp next summer too because there’s just not enough money to pay for both right now.

Jody gets the new glasses he definitely needs and Jill gets the braces her dentist says she needs. But Joe doesn’t get the new glasses his eye doctor says he needs, because there’s just not enough money left in the till to pay for both right now. And Jane skips lunches at the office to save money, and she works extra overtime to help pay for Jill’s braces, even though that means she also has less time to spend helping Jill with her homework after gymnastics class.

And so it goes. You know the drill. It’s a constant battle of give-and-take, of trading these means off against those ends, of balancing one set of needs against another set of needs and weighing all of them against these choices and those options. Eventually it all gets done. The kids get the stuff they get and they go back to school. And Jody complains to his pals about how his parents don’t care about him because they stuck him with these crummy ol’ cheap sneakers. Jill’s bummed out about having to miss computer camp this year, but at the same time she’s happy because at least she gets to keep doing her gymnastics.

Meanwhile Joe gets eyestrain headaches and squints a lot, and Jane is exhausted by the time she gets home from work. And God only knows how they’ll manage to pay for college when that comes around. But they both know that everything’s a compromise and the devil’s in the details and so life goes on somehow.

So how are you going to summarize all of that in 5-second sound bites and 2-sentence talking points? ... “Joe is anti-education because he voted against letting children go to computer camps” ... “Jane is a bad mother because she’d rather work than stay at home with her kids” ... “The economy’s in trouble because people like Joe and Jane are spending money on non-essentials rather than putting it into private accounts for their future retirement” ... and so it goes.

You see what I mean here? You ask for a steak, but you end up with a sausage. That’s unfortunate, but it’s also inevitable. And after-the-fact talking-point statements like “Senator Z voted against funding our troops and defending our country” are every bit as invalid as statements like “Joe is anti-education and Jane’s a bad mom.”

Everything’s a compromise. The devil is in the details. And it’s never that simple. Not in the real world, anyway.

  --   Rick Albertson