Stories the Budget Tells

The president’s budget proposal appears each year at the beginning of February. In the old days, we stood in line at the Government Printing Office and carried back two armloads of books: the budget, historical tables, analytical perspectives, the appendix, and the Congressional Budget Office’s analyses. Now these tomes appear in an instant – on February 1 at 10:00 a.m. – on the web site of the Office of Management and Budget.

We open files full of numbers. We dive in, applying our own analysis tools, and emerge with a short list of answers to our questions. Here’s how much the president proposes to spend on war, past, present, and future. Here’s how much health care – in all its forms – will cost.

Here’s what the president plans to spend in response to poverty and to shore up the economy. Here are the tiny amounts the president would spend to respond to climate change and to relate to the rest of the world in ways that don’t involve an army. The president’s budget proposal begins to take on a shape that we can show in tables, stacks of coins, or sliced-up pies.

These charts and graph are just the beginning. Those files full of numbers hold deeper and more important stories about our nation. Looking back at long patterns of military spending, we see a nation mired in militarism, apparently unable to turn away from its deep addiction to confrontation and the tools and weapons that support that approach.

We see a nation that, at one time, took giant steps to reduce and eliminate poverty. Now, despite President Obama’s stated commitment to reducing poverty by half in ten years, the rate of poverty and hunger – especially among children – continues to rise.

The numbers show how little U.S. taxpayers pay to support science and environmental programs. In those numbers we see a country that hasn’t yet come to grips with the threat presented by climate change. Members of Congress are unable to embrace a comprehensive response to climate change that would wean the country from oil dependence, and, in his budget, President Obama proposes to focus far more resources on perceived political threats than on actual threats from the natural world.

Finally, the numbers show how little our nation knows about preventing war. The national imagination is so weak when it comes to the tools needed to build peace that U.S. taxpayers are satisfied to live, year to year, with a budget that invests only a penny of each dollar in relating to the world through diplomacy, development, and international cooperation. This smart and able nation could do so much better.

FCNL has long described the budget as a document that reflects this country's moral choices about priorities. In fact, the document itself simply records the monetary cost of the stories played out in our nation. The numbers can’t show the lives lost in war, the talent and generosity wasted in poverty, the potential for peace-building left undiscovered. The budget is merely a record and a projection. The narratives of these individual stories are the real moral document.

Published in FCNL's March/April Washington Newsletter