Gear 11: Budget
Budgets are a curious fish. At their most basic level, a budget, in the present is clearly a reasonable (if not vital). To live on a budget, is to define oneself within a spending brackets. It is then to ensure on a day to day basis that one still has money, and will have money. The budget is then the sense one allows the future to be allowed for (if not organized) in the present. Live within your means, the legend goes and everything will b Ok. So for, so absolutely sensible., he oddities really start when the budget is torn form his reaction to limitation, and becomes rather a thread to guide a reader across a future or though a past. That is the moment the idea of balancing a budget in the long or short term,, is pitched against the world, and allowed it be something in its own right. The budget then becomes no about managing what one has, but also about predicting what one will have. It jumps then the ‘classic science it was embedded within. It ceases to about arranging the home within a lack, and becomes more about managing a future or better tracing a way into a future.
In order that it does this, it will of course have to jump tense. Thinking about a budget becomes then not really about managing a present so much as initially at least) reviewing a past. Here surely the tax form is he paradigm. In filling out a tax form one presents a fixed budget of what was: One reviews hen a life I money and earning. Likewise t I sometimes useful to actually work out what one has spent (and eanred0 over a period of time, so that one knows where the money has gone, and why one has the amount one does. Budgeting becomes then not about managing the present, so much as reviewing the past, with perhaps the hope that this organization will allow one to predict ways one might over into a future. One manages in the then, to work out what might be.
Budget as review of the past, offers one a way to understand exactly how a budget change across time, as income alters, and as ones proprieties actually shifted. The problems one thought one had, were no real problems, an the anxieties one never predicted really stated to matter. Such a form of budgeting perhaps ought then to teach one the impossibility of presenting a budget for the future. And yet of course all too seldom this is a lesson that is absolutely unlearn able. Perhaps the problem really come to the nature of enterers and figures. I writing and balancing the past, one is reckoning up numbers and concerns, both of which pertain as much t the future as their do to the past. To reckon up what was, is then to create also a methodology or at least a means to understand or encompass a future. The future budget will after all look exactly the same.
The there an then slips then almost immediately into that science of prediction. I umps tense, and start looking to the future, and thinking about how it should be budgeted for. Ere one gets caught up with another feature of capitalism and money, which has been discusses in Rants elsewhere and exclusively. There is an aspect of many that is never of the here and now, it is rather always caught up with the future. To invest in a share or to think about an economy is never then to think about what it here and now. , it rather to take a gamble or a punt upon the future. He entire recent crisis has at its base a problem or pitch about the nature of this future. Investors gambles on one future: the future : A future which saw the one aspect of the world that is fixed, land increasing in value in the face of increases and changes in everything else. This future, was allowed to invade a finance market;. Or perhaps to be more truthful this future become the way that this finance market was actually financed. It used money taken or borrowed from the rejected future. The minute (due to price of oil, perpetual war, and environmental worries that future looked less certain, than the entire enterprise started to unpick. The assumed future was just that- merely an assumption (and the fact that assumption as based of property did not make it any better). The money the future ha so kindly lent us, suddenly slipped away or worded was transposed into debt, as we discovered that we had spent what would have been ours already, and so lost the rights to that future we has been promised.
Capitalism in its current incarnation therefore operates as a punt into the future., and it is clear within this punting the budget has a vital part to play. The budget sanitises or castrate the future, making it feel less bothersome and more prescient. This containment or capturing has several aspects, drawn from the idea budgets past, present and to come., but all twisted into new and somewhat bizarre shape.
The future budget clearly borrows two ideas from the present. First and foremost in borrows the idea of balancing and accounting That household budget with its weekly income and outcome, becomes then the economic paradigm. All this nations companies, arts applications ought to be able to balance or account for their spending and their out goings. The result is that producing crypto-future casts of whose only merit is that they balance has become the shibboleth of all grant application and all government departments To Budget is therefore to force upon a future a unity or circle of being. The future is no doubt made to appear score, caught as it is in a circle of time (inputs and output), and yet it is the clear feature an perpetual feature of all futures , that they are a be as unbound. The future I simply not to be contained within this manner. It has a habit then of doing what is not expected, or cannot be foreseen. The circle might comfort the present, and given the present the idea that somehow it knows what it is talking about ,and yet it has nothing to say about what will come, or the worries that will be. An capping budget is therefore ipso facto and distortion or even a lie.
The trouble of course is that over recent years this form of double accountancy – what individuals actually think, and what they fill in to fulfil budget or performance targets has become the norm. The reason for these lies is simple enough it is this squaring the circle. I is these promises and these cod statistics that make good politics if poor reality. They are then what officials and politicians will spout endlessly. The political debate then slips in the name of cod budget (and the supposed rubric of reliability they invoke) and odd statistics into pure fantasy. The figures then government is running the country with (and the opposition react to) as sensible as the expenses claims of mps and the salaried of bankers…
The second aspect a budget takes fro the present is the idea of control. The household budget works in a sense because one can predict what will be, there are then bills to pay, and times one needs to pay for them. The budget the creates a paradigm of progressed time within circular concerns. WE then need to pay certain amount at certain times (or have a certain income at a certain time), while all the while getting richer or poorer over all . he model is then rather reassuring, and yet of course fundamentally flawed. I simply not obvious that the same rules apply for 65 million people, all doing disparate things, and all relating independently to the world beyond the household, as it is does to four or five people. A factor that is even more likely as the hold budget model itself collapsed when things became more complex 9that is homes stopped being a fixed number of people and a steady income). More than that there are clear prescient differences between a state which can print its own money and rewrite it own laws and those homes which are bound up within any system they find themselves within.
The effect of this difference is that in the imposition of the one model, either an act of subterfuge or castration must actually occur. Either a political system actually has to sacrifice its power to another organization (IMF, or auditing committee or credit organization or whatever) to form the role of the system within which household-as-state is held; or else it is simply a lies and the sate never was and never will behave like a home. With this last point, the main difference eyes of course that (within certain rules, and if it big enough), states will change the rues if this get tough (or at least change the way they do accountancy), and so avoid the proms of being too like a home.
From the budget-past, the budget future lifts the reassuring science of numbers, tables and their deceit. That is any good budgets creates a welter of figures which would it is alldged0 look the same in the future past and the do in the future. We therefore seek o create charts that fly in the face of tense (the difference between pasts and futures).
In making this move, we in effect double up the problems of statistics and its projections. Figures from the past already are problematic, as they are only add good as the choices than were made in gathering them. Survey the wrong thing or too incautiously and even the most carefully produced freight of numbers is cod. Any attempt then to produce figures for the future is doubly problematic. On the one hand taking the same set of figures and projecting them into the future is always very tricky. It is the prime feature of the future that things change. , and the game of knowing exactly what will latter defy straight forward thinking. The methodology for producing a future set of numbers is therefore always almost necessarily suspect. But even more problematic than this, exactly what those figures means is also rather tricky., as one cannot safely or simply abstract what will matters in that future. Some broad themes might be predictable, and yet they will be limited in their scope and their relevance.
The result of course is that a budget which has at its heart a projection into the future is rather a limiting affair. Politics becomes merely that which is understood in terms of what can be projected into the future (or at least of what is projected within the figures belong too obviously daffy or naïve). The future then restrict what can be done or even said in he present. In doing so it in effect distances a democracy from its own populating; that is the very need to be accountable and to appeal to people restricts what could be said and does so in such a way that actually alienates a people.
There is a second aspect to this alienation. In presenting a budget one presents as t were the review of future as if it were a past, on does not show how the entire picture resolved into the future as past. Thetas is perfumed then by whatever economic or finical guru currently has vogue. These take the figures and crunch them into a portrait of an economy as it works and not merely as it exists in the review of figures). The result of cause is the oddest of beasts. In this model one has a prediction of what the chancellor is say the economic will look like as it entries its own past. That is one models the economy that the statistics claim to be the future past of. Such a model is highly problematic, as opens up all kind of questions about what rights one has to this future as past, and what on earth this modeling might mean.
Budget in relation to the future are rather problematic affairs. ,At their heart is the move that neutralizes or contains the future itself. The budget therefore must hold out a pretence that somehow the future it is after all known. And yet the temptation is always to boor from the power of that future in two main ways. First and most simply one can borrow in a linear manner form what will be. So that one can implement cuts, in the future or reward the present but do so in a way that restrict future rewards. The future then offers a texture which can be folded and refolded, tend so allows any politicians to square that circle of present reasonable budget but also being political expedient.
Far more profoundly the future offers the odd resource of actually always being unpredictable. It lies then in the futures power to bugger up very budget and render any attempt to contain what will be nonsense. This resource dare not speak it name, and yet it haunt every budget: the dream that things might not be that bad, or might suddenly get better, or might simply be otherwise. This dream then renders in a sense all budgets provisional and more a holding exercise than anything else. The budget is how we claim to be defending ourselves again a future we hope will not happen (while looking for other escape routes, and other short or long term fixes). The Budget then conceals the fact that actually the most powerful force on British political life is that no one knows where the future will come from. The role of the budget is not then to contain the future so much as o create a smoke screen which gives politicians a breathing space, to look for (and so claim credit for) whatever new futures are emerging.
To gear up budgets then is to pitch into the future a cog forged in the present, and perfected into the past. This cog whirls around, demanding we listen, demanding we conform in understanding futures as pasts and presents. This demand in a sense makes life easy, and far less frightening. And yet it can only do so, at the political costs of shutting down so much debate and so much other was of understanding freedoms. The budget then castrates a population, even as it renders them democratic (and so free).
