Tax Expenditure Budgets, Budget Policy, and Tax Policy: Confusion in the States

A tax expenditure budget should contribute to efficient and effective public decisions by quantifying the division in the tax structure between provisions that represent revenue policy (distribute the cost of government according to the legislated tax base) and parts that represent budget policy (substitute for direct spending). For this transparency to have the desired impact, however, the tax expenditure budget process and the direct expenditure process must be properly integrated and the tax expenditure budget must make an accurate division between the parts of the tax structure. A review of the 33 states with tax expenditure systems shows many weaknesses in application of the concept and poor linkage to the direct spending budget system. Their most significant flaw is in dividing the tax structure into normal and preference elements; states need greater attention to defining their basic tax structure if they are to have a meaningful tax expenditure budget.     

Tullock's rent-seeking contest with a minimum expenditure requirement

We consider a rent-seeking contest of the kind introduced by Tullock (1980) in which two players compete for a monopoly rent. We extend the contest by requiring that if a player puts forward an effort, his expenditures must be larger than or equal to some minimum level. We show that, depending on the model parameters, the number of Nash equilibria of the extended model can be zero, one, two or four. Furthermore, it turns out that the extent of rent dissipation in a Nash equilibrium of the extended model can be larger than, equal to, or smaller than the extent of rent dissipation in the unique Nash equilibrium of the original model.     

Self-imposed term limits

In “Reconciling voters' behavior with legislative term limits,” Dick and Lott argue that since more senior representatives are better at rent-seeking, there is an inefficient tendency to re-elect incumbents. In their model, term limits are preferred collectively by constituencies, even though no constituency would independently oust its incumbent representative. However, many term limits are unilaterally self-imposed (in particular the 22nd amendment limiting presidents' terms to two), and their model cannot explain these limits. In this comment, I suggest that term limits may be self-imposed by risk-averse voters, who prefer cycling between left and right wing candidates to a once-and-for-all election that imposes a candidate of a single ideology on the entre electorate. The market failure that makes term limits helpful is that out of power minorities cannot bribe the median voter.     

Budget Control in Virginia Public School Districts

This article examines the selection and use of a budget approval technique. Specifically, two research questions are addressed: (1) Does the use of a particular budget approval method by a governmental body impact the execution of the budget? (2) What characteristics of a local government are associated with its decision to use a particular budget approval method? Both research questions are addressed by analyzing data from public school systems in the Commonwealth of Virginia, specifically, whether using categorical budget approval differs in the accuracy of budgeting versus using a lump-sum approval method. Characteristics of Virginia school districts are also analyzed according to whether any of them are likely to be associated with school districts using a particular approval method. The remainder of this article is organized as follows: the next section describes the role of budgeting control in schools; subsequent sections review Virginia school district budgeting practices, develop the empirical model used to test the hypotheses, describe the sample, analyze the results of empirical tests and discuss implications of the findings.