Incremental Thinking: "Toward a Theory of Budgeting"

Editor's Note: V.O. Key's article bemoaning "The Lack of a Budgetary Theory" was reprinted in the previous issue of Public Budgeting & Finance. The problems identified by Key are normative; they go to the basic values arid purposes of society and, hence, cannot be resolved by budgetary solutions alone. But a dozen years after Key wrote, Verne Lewis sought to anchor a theory of budgeting in marginal analysis, His article, printed here by permission of the American Society for Public Administration, first appeared in the Public Administration Review in 1952, Rather than seeking a full-blown political philosophy. Lewis thought that budgetary choice could be rationalized at the margins, by comparing the marginal costs and benefits of competing claims on public resources, While his hopes for a theory of budgeting have not been fulfilled, Lewis laid the groundwork for forms of marginal analysis introduced by PPB and ZBB in later decades. Indeed, there is a remarkable affinity between the budgetary structure proposed by Lewis and the one used by zero-base budgeting in the 1970s.