23 organizations, including OMB Watch, signed and sent a letter to Congress today asking for a sustained commitment to PAYGO budgeting rules. As the Ways and Means Committee is ready to mark up the AMT patch, now is an important time to reaffirm Congress's commitment to these rules.

The Drum Major Institute has an intriguing new website up- themiddleclass.org- where you can basically track legislation that matters to the "current and aspiring" middle class, and get a reliable perspective on what it's all about.

Its unveiling is a good opportunity to rundown a couple other really useful sites that help everyone -myself included- hold the government accountable.

• OpenCongress.Org- like Thomas, but understandable.
• OpenSecrets.Org- complete records of campaign donations.
• Congresspedia- a wiki site on Congress that anyone can update.
• And of course, OMB Watch's FedSpending.Org- to see what the end result of all this puttering around is.

A few facts on the congressional budget resolution (from Allen Shick's classic The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy and Process):

• For about the first 200 years of this country, there was no congressional Budget Resolution (BR) and no discretionary cap.
• The budget resolution was originally conceived of as a way to reduce deficits. When it didn't work that well, discretionary caps were added to make it stronger.
• The discretionary spending has decreased from nearly 1/2 the budget in 1975 (the year of the first budget resolution) to less than 1/3rd now.
• In 1975, domestic discretionary outlays were 4.4 percent of GDP. The Congressional budget plan for FY08 has it at 3.6 percent. That difference (by my back of the envelope calculation) is equal to about $100 billion in today's dollars.

For more on why the discretionary budget cap (or the congressional budget resolution?) may not be the best idea, see this post.

After yesterday's post on the budget process, I got to thinking: what's the point of the Congressional Budget Resolution (see this Powerpoint for budget process basics)?

Budget process experts will tell you that it brings order and coordination to the annual budget. But it also puts pressure to keep discretionary spending low.

I'm talking about the cap on discretionary spending. Once it's set, it's rarely exceeded. In fact, its purpose is to make sure that spending does not go above a certain level. That is anti-spending.

And is it even necessary? I can imagine a budget resolution without a cap that still helped coordinate the efforts of the two Houses. It could set goals for each appropriations bill and give reconciliation instructions. It could even set a topline goal. But it wouldn't have to make it enforceable.

If there isn't a cap, groups won't be fighting each other as much for funding. It'd be easier to add funding once the bills were on the floor. And it'd be even easier to readjust the appropriations bills for surprises. Supplementals wouldn't be as common, I'd imagine.

In fact, if we really wanted to facilitate discretionary spending, we could make it a funding "floor" instead of a cap, i.e. funding couldn't be any lower than X. That could improve coordination at the same time.

The fact of the matter is that the annual budget process is broken. We've now got supplemental appropriations bills that have almost reached $200 billion. Increased discretionary spending is a high priority, it seems, but the budget process might be thwarting or distorting its expression.

Inclusion(ist?) has up an interesting paper about the need to reform the budget process. Its thesis is that the budget process has been structured in a way that has successfully prioritized deficit reduction, and that these rules have focused attention more on the price of spending than its value.

I won't engage the specifics of the proposal to reform the budget process. But I think it makes an important point about budget politics and process. Coincidentally, it echoes the imitable Stan Collender in his column this week:

There has been strong political pressure in the United States to reduce the deficit for at least the past two decades. Eliminating the deficit became a formal requirement in the mid-1980s when Gramm-Rudman-Hollings made reducing the deficit the government's explicitly stated policy. While no longer required, it has been a political imperative ever since GRH and its successors were allowed to expire.

If Stan Collender says it, it must be true: budget politics have centered around the deficit. But its arguable that the budget process is the cause of this focus. As Collender points up, deficits remained central well after a tule aimed at reducing the deficit lapsed.

Similarly, conservative demand for passing enormous tax cuts probably came before the changes to PAYGO rules. Once they were in power, they changed the rules to promote their preferences. The Democrats have restored PAYGO rules, most likely because they wanted to make sure that they would pass deficit-neutral legislation. If process determined policy, the Democrats would not have acted any differently than the Republicans, and wouldn't have made the budget process changes they did.

Anyway, I find it more convincing that budget process rules follow, rather than precede, a change in the political climate. That's not to say they don't have a strong influence on policy; without PAYGO rules, I find it hard to imagine that every mandatory spending and tax bill would have been offset.

But is deficit reduction still that what people want from government? It reminds me of something Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in the New York Times last week:

It's just as clear that Democrats think that the political game has changed. Pay for most workers has been growing only a little faster than inflation over the last five years, and except for the late 1990s hasn't really done well since the early 1970s. Inequality has returned to the levels of the 1920s.

''It's an economy that demands more from our workers and gives less in return,'' Hillary Clinton said in Iowa this week, on her Middle Class Express bus tour. As Charles Schumer, New York's other senator, told me earlier this year: ''In the past, the attitude was, 'Get government out of the way.' And now it's, 'Gee, I may need it.' ''

If Schumer and Clinton, two centrists if there ever were any, are correct, we need to start talking about how to change the budget process to ensure that the public gets what it wants. Once deficit reduction is no longer the public's chief fiscal goal, it seems appropriate to make the budget process facilitate spending. This paper's a good place to begin that conversation.

The war in Iraq has given rise to numerous scandals and allegations of violation of U.S. law sufficient to undermine America's moral authority abroad and at home for a long time to come.

Two excellent recent write-ups shedding light on how the latest such scandal, "Blackwatergate," reflects on budget politics and beyond are below:

• Blackwatergate Is Also A Big Budget Problem, Stan Collender

  ... unless federal budget politics change drastically, there will continue to be a premium on projecting ongoing military spending as low as possible by underestimating the nature and extent of the threat and the troops needed to deal with it... It also means that the U.S. will rely on firms like Blackwater for quite some time unless revenues and spending reductions become a politically acceptable way to pay for the increase in personnel costs that would result from a more realistic assessment.

• The Other Blackwaters, Matt Lewis, OMB Watch

  ... privatization—through corporate subsidies, contracting and even some tax breaks—makes it much more difficult for the government to win the "hearts and minds" of the public. As a result, public confidence in government is at rock bottom.

OMB has released the 2008 schedule for the release of principal federal economic indicators. The agencies providing this information are as follows:

• Foreign Agricultural Service -- www.pecad.fas.usda.gov
• National Agricultural Statistics Service -- www.nass.usda.gov
• World Agricultural Outlook Board -- www.usda.gov/oce/waob/index.htm
• Bureau of the Census -- www.census.gov/epcd/econ/www/indijun.htm
• Bureau of Economic Analysis -- www.bea.gov/bea/rels.htm
• Energy Information Administration -- www.eia.doe.gov
• Bureau of Labor Statistics -- www.bls.gov/bls/newsrels.htm
• Federal Reserve Board -- www.federalreserve.gov/releases

For the OMB schedule of release dates, click here.