Budgets Are Not Moral Documents

God's Politics: Our Moral Audit of the Budget

Four years ago, faced with a disastrous federal budget proposal, Sojourners coined a phase, "budgets are moral documents." That phrase has now entered the common lexicon, but it remains our fundamental principle. ...

... There are also specific changes in important areas such as tax policy, food and nutrition programs, housing, needed aid to veterans, prisoner re-entry, global food security, and increased foreign aid for combating pandemic disease. It's a budget aimed at redressing the imbalances. ... (emphasis is mine)

With all due respect, budgets are not moral documents. Budgets are financial statements. They tell us how many dollars have been attributed to line items created by an accountant. Morality can't be determined from dollars allocated to line items. Morality is determined by the actual outcomes achieved! Aiming is not enough. Achieving is everything.

It is possible to spend an enormous sum of money and have zero impact on poverty. In fact, despite good intentions, it is possible to spend an enormous amount and make things worse. It is also possible to spend minimal amounts and have a major impact.

Wallis believes that the poor have not been fairing as well as they should in recent years. Fine. But economies are organic, dynamic systems, and issues like poverty are often significantly affected through the subsidiary impact of countless societal patterns that have nothing to do with intentional spending on the poor by government.

Outcomes are everything. Profit-making enterprises have a relatively easy time measuring their effectiveness. Customer sales, and profits on those sales, provide a direct feedback loop to the business on whether the business is meeting customers' needs.

Not-for-profit enterprises have a greater challenge. First of all, "not-for-profit" is misleading. "Not-for-profit" firms must bring in more than they spend, just like for-profit firms do; it is just that they don't distribute profits to any shareholders. They must make a profit.

Second, most not-for-profit firms have two customers. One set of customers are the donors who contribute the funds, and the other set is the recipients of the services. Rarely are they the same people. So where is the feedback loop for the not-for-profit firm about how well it is meeting its recipient customer's needs? That has to be established through conscious diligent measurement.

Government has the same problem. The money comes from the taxpayer to the legislature (or other fiscal body) to be used for recipients who are not paying directly for services. Conscious diligent measurement must be applied.

 I can't tell you what a challenge it has been to move to an outcome-based evaluation during my work on the board of the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church U. S. A. It is quite pervasive not to use measurable outcomes in the not-for-profit world. We are getting there at the GAC, but the idea that dollars allocated to a purpose compared to dollars allocated to another purpose are a measure of relative importance is deeply embedded with many in our society.

Wallis and company are aiding fiscal irresponsibility in promoting this mindset. In reality, this is just partisan rhetoric. Wallis believes in massive government-run programs for the poor. The effectiveness of specific programs is peripheral because he has a faith commitment, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, that such programs will generate substantial solutions.

Declaring the budget a moral document and using "dollars allocated" as the measure should more likely be seen as a way to moralistically impugn those who do not share Wallis' faith in big government solutions. Responsible Christian reflection demands that we look deeper beyond "aims" and "dollars allocated" to actual consequences and outcomes.

Comments

[phil_style]

Thanks Michael. You identify some important distictions - particulalry surrounding the term not-for-profit.

[Michael W. Kruse]

You're welcome. I think it is a critical difference.

[Dennis Sanders]

Okay...so I guess you answered my question... :)

[Michael W. Kruse]

You inspired this post. :-)

[Adam Carrier]

I think the principle Wallis & Co. are trying to inject into the Federal Budget comes from the idea that our spending tells a lot about what we prioritize (Lk12:34 "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.")

I think Wallis' point is aimed at the drastically underrepresented funding for "programs of social uplift", to quote Dr. King. In that sense, our national morality is rightly measured by seeing the impressive gap between funding for Defense and funding for poverty reduction.

You're still correct in that more money spent does not necessarily yield more results (or any results for that matter).

"God's Politics" was good --I'm reading "Great Awakening" now.

[Michael W. Kruse]

Thanks Adam. My big concern with the "budget is a moral document" thinking is that it tends to take our eye off the ball of how the poor actually make out. That has to be our central focus.