capital budget

The three prior posts on a capital budget get to the heart of the problem.  We underinvest in infrastructure for which the federal government bears some responsibility, but trying to rectify that problem through a greater budgetary emphasis in the Congress has smart budget analysts thinking it will be ineffective at best.  I'd like to suggest that just because the status quo of almost no capital budgeting is bad and the extreme of a fully developed capital budget may be no better does not mean that there are no intermediate arrangements that would be better.

I always hate to disagree with any of my fellow CG&G bloggers, but I feel that I have no choice when it comes to Bruce's post below advocating capital budgeting.

I was a member of the President's Commission to Study Capital Budgeting that was created during the Clinton administration ( see page 10 of the report Bruce cites) so I've spent a great deal of time on this issue.  In a perfect world or if we were creating the system for the first time, we should indeed have a capital budget and capital budgeting.  But neither of these exists and, although I started on the commission convinced a capital budget was the right way to go, I came to understand that the implementation problems are so serious that there was no way to make it work.

In brief...

1.  There is no established definition of what constitutes a capital expense at the federal level.