The Glade 4.0

Right.... One budget, which Congress is responsible for. Executive is responsible for submitting a request for their piece of it.

There really isn't. Things have since 1921. They've changed substantially since the CBO (legislative agency) was created in 1974.

The law you're citing refers to the budget report generated by the OMB (executive agency) and given to Congress. The president's budget report is only just that -- a report to Congress. These days, it serves only as input fodder for the CBO. The CBO generates its own budget report, which might well tell the president's budget report to go **** itself. The CBO report is referred to both the House and the Senate budget committee. The House committee generates a budget resolution while the Senate committee independently generates its own. These resolutions may each tell the CBO report and the president's budget report to go **** themselves. They will probably also tell each other to go **** their respective selves. The House committee might or might not reconcile these into "the" budget resolution, which is the closest thing we have to an official federal budget. At the end of the day, the resolution might or might not be passed. At all. Ever. Nothing in current law actually requires Congress to pass a budget. By extension, there also aren't any requirements that appropriation bills correlate with the federal budget since it might not exist at all. Even if it does pass, it's just a resolution. It has no weight of law, so Congress can blithely ignore it anyway.

So there is only one federal budget report mandated by law. As a matter of actual budget procedure, there is essentially no federal budget, but there might be as many as 5 depending on how you want to count it.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Why are you inserting the word "report" into the law when it is not there? Both laws (which have not been repealed or amended that I can find) state:

"requires the President to submit the budget to Congress"

"requires that the President submit the budget"

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http://budget.house.gov/budgetprocess/

Basic budget laws - PDF alert

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default ... ar/s15.pdf

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In time, this too shall pass.

Unless it's an Amendment to the Constitution, it does not supersede Article I, section 7:

"All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills."

This is not a bill for raising revenue, it is a budget of how to spend that revenue.

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So yeah, the President submits the budget and the House approves/amends/denies it as the does the Senate. Neither the House nor the Senate cannot create the budget.

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Hopwin, regardless of all that, has the president ever failed to submit a budget to Congress? I don't think the reason Congress fails to pass a budget every year is because the President fails to submit one to them. Since #1 requires a new law to be written, you can just include an exception where, if the President fails to submit a budget, Congress will still get paid even if they don't pass one. Or they could just amend the Budget and Accounting Act as part of the law. It's not really a big deal.

So this proposed 12 rule law would mean that Congress must rubberstamp the budget submitted to them or be penalized?

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At the risk of sounding flippant: because the word "budget" literally refers to a money purse. Modern usage abstracts that idea, but it isn't completely divorced from the original sense. When a person says "the budget" using the definite article and no further qualification, they're referring to the operating budget -- that is, the budget actually adopted by whoever is holding the purse strings. If I created a budget for your household and handed it to you, we wouldn't call that "the household budget" unless you decided to adopt it. Otherwise, it might be "a budget" or a "budget proposal", but that's about it.

The president doesn't control the purse strings, whether we're considering a de jur context or a de facto one. The entity referred to in that law is nothing more than a suggestion or request to Congress. It has no weight of law behind it. The law requires the president to create it, but it does not require anyone to follow it. Further, Congress sets (or doesn't set) the operating budget through the budget resolution. This is the only budget that matters, and even that doesn't matter very much.

Sure, the official title of the document created by the OMB is "Budget of the U.S. Government" but ... so what? They can call it whatever they'd like -- it doesn't change what it is.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

So then Stathol, setting aside the rest of your argument (which I agree with) you see no difference between me saying I need to create a monthly budget versus a monthly budget report? A report is by definition something that occured in the past and to refer to the spending proposal for the future fiscal year that is submitted by the President as a report is dishonest.

Lawyer dog disapproves.

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No. Only that they must pass a budget.

Which of the two chambers?

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Both chambers. They have to pass the same budget. No idea if they want an exception to be made for Presidential vetoes.

This is probably only going to serve to derail the discussion even further, but...


Not necessarily, and in the general sense of the word, no.
That's all. It's closely related to "rapport", which in so many words just means "to talk". A report is literally just any instance of conveying related information. It need not be about an event, although that's sometimes the case for some sub-meanings like "eye-witness report". Lots of government reports are speculative in nature.



There is a difference, but the latter statement strikes me as nonsensical. Why would you write a report to yourself? You already know whatever you're reporting. It's not really a report unless you're conveying information to some other party.

Your monthly budget is an intangible. It's just a set of parameters -- the size of the proverbial purses that you've established for your various areas of expenditure. If you create a written record of your household budget, it's just a written record of your household budget. I wouldn't call that a report, either. Now suppose that you and your (hypothetical?) wife (sorry - can't remember if you're married) have decided that your household budget should be joint decision. If you draft up your suggestion for what the budget should be, then what you have is a budget request, budget proposal, proposed budget, or budget report, since you're conveying information to your wife. If she agrees with you and you adopt the proposal as-is, then what was discussed in the report becomes the household budget, and the paper document itself is then promoted to a record of the household budget.

I'm not really sure what any of that has to do with anything, but there you go.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Indeed, we are plumbing new depths of semantic nitpickery here. (Which is no one in particular's fault)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You know.. withholding congressional pay doesn't go far enough for #1.

Withhold the congress-person's pay, that of their staff, and increase their annual tax rate to 100% of all income-generating activities. Revoke their campaign's non-profit status for the year, and jack its tax rate up.

What's that? This makes it really hard for incumbents to campaign against challengers if they don't pass a budget, and they'll probably have to fire their staff (and have a really hard time finding people willing to risk being their staff)? Gosh, darn. Maybe they should take the whole notion of taking ownership of the fiscal state of our nation seriously, then. After all, the entire reason they DON'T pass budgets anymore is so they're not on a black and white record supporting the bankrupting of our nation and can try to weasel their way off the wall when the angry revolution comes.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Incentive to pass a budget is inentive to pass ANY budget.

Cmon people, lets realize what this really incentivizes.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

But if you voted "YES" on the "**** the economy" budget that drives our standard of living into the ground, you're first against the wall without the "I never agreed to the reckless spending!" excuse.

I mean, not being on record supporting irresponsible spending is the entire reason we have continuing resolutions instead of budgets nowadays anyways, so I don't buy the argument that they're not afraid of signing off on piles of ****.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Or you could just add a balanced budget amendment on top of that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You could require a balanced budget -capped at a certain level of GDP- and tie congressional pay to GDP as well. If you want to do something about congressional pay and the budget, that would be the way to go.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Congressional pay... aren't they all in the 1% anyways? Serious question.

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I ask because I don't think you go into Congress to make money, I think you go in to protect your money.

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If you look at people like Mike Oxley, or even Harry Reid, they were average when they joined congress, but are worth millions now.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I have no facts to back this up, but I'm pretty sure a very large percentage of elected officials are filthy rich scumbag lawyers.