The federal budget shows income and outgo on a cash basis.⁽²⁾ The primary "capital budget" alternative would amortize capital investment over its useful lifetime. In discussing this alternative, we assume:

    (1) The primary alternative would change the way that capital investment is "scored." Consumption would continue to be scored on a cash basis, but capital investment would be scored on an amortized basis. This alternative is what we mean by "capital budget accounting."

    (2) The capital budget alternative, if adopted, would change the "scoring" of capital expenditures, but there would still be only one federal budget. Capital investments would be scored when consumed rather than when purchased. All federal spending would be captured in the federal budget; but a new issue would be raised: in what year(s) should the capital spending be recorded?

    (3) Some conceive capital budget accounting as implying two budgets: a "capital budget" and an "operating budget." For this discussion, we conceive capital budget accounting as a change to the current budget, which would still leave one budget in place.⁽³⁾

    With this kind of capital budgeting, we expect that the budget surplus or deficit, at least over the near term following conversion, would be similar to the surplus or deficit under cash accounting, because the annual consumption (amortization) of existing capital would be about as great as the annual outlays for new capital goods.

    Some advocates of capital budget accounting have proposed that the cost of future capital investment would be amortized, but that capital investments purchased before the change in accounting would continue to be shown on a cash basis. As a result, in the immediate years after conversion, prior construction costs would not show up in the budget because the disbursements for such construction would have occurred in prior years, and new construction costs would show up only in small amounts because only the one-year amortization of such costs would be recorded. Hence, most of the highway budget -- and the budget of other capital investments -- would disappear, and the budget would suddenly seem to be improved by tens of billions of dollars. This opens the door to legerdemain. Our assumption -- that the federal surplus or deficit would be similar under either cash or capital accounting -- assumes a conversion to capital budget accounting in which the amortization, (i.e. the consumption or depreciation), of prior capital investment would be shown as a current federal cost.

    Because surpluses or deficits are likely to be much the same under either a cash budget or a correctly designed capital budget, capital budget accounting is unlikely to alter how Congress, the President, and the public react to surpluses or deficits. Therefore, the main effect of capital budget accounting may be to tip the scales in favor of capital goods and against current consumption. Suppose, for example, that Congress is forced to squeeze spending in order to meet a particular budget target. Under capital budget accounting, the incentive to cut capital investment would be much less than the incentive to cut consumption, because cutting capital investment would save only the first-year amortized cost of the capital goods.

    Under capital budget accounting, the basic concept is different. Because the budget would show capital investment only when consumed (amortized over time), the budget would be easy prey to a "pay-as-you-go" philosophy. The view could easily develop that taxes should pay for current consumption, including consumption of capital. Since the benefits of capital investment accrue in the future, this view would hold that payment for capital goods should be deferred, based on the rationalization that future taxpayers will benefit from it and they should pay for it.⁽⁴⁾
 
    These are competing concepts of federal spending. The budget could be portrayed using both. But Congress has to work with one operative concept of budgeting, and it has to be used consistently over time. Having the budget measure consumption as it occurs (capital budget accounting) is a defensible principle, maybe as a good principle as using it to measure economic stimulus or restraint. But there are problems with the principle of capital budget accounting --

• Capital budget accounting does not distinguish between wise investments and wasteful investments. If the government undertakes investments with low (or negative) rates of return, there may be scant benefits to future taxpayers, and capital budget accounting could shift costs to them without accompanying benefits.

 
• Capital budget accounting encourages the tendency to shift tax requirements to future taxpayers, because they will reap the benefits of current capital investment. It does not ask whether future taxpayers will want aircraft carriers more than air pollution controls, or whether they will be relatively undertaxed or overtaxed. In reality, the cost growth of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security dictate that future taxpayers will probably bear a heavier tax burden than current taxpayers.

• Some spending correctly characterized as "consumption" may improve the economic well being of future generations, such as anti-pollution measures, preventive health care for children, food safety, and worker safety. Though these expenditures pay dividends well into the future, they are mostly intangible investments and would be characterized as current expenditures by most capital budgets. This begs the question: Who will be the arbiter and say which expenditures will bear benefits over the long-run and which will be consumed in the short-run? Accountants? Economists? Elected politicians? Civil Servants?

  CHANGING CONGRESSIONAL DECISION MAKING: THE REAL GOAL OF CAPITAL BUDGET ACCOUNTING

    Here's why amortizing the cost of a capital investment is thought to give it an edge over purchases recorded under cash accounting concepts. Under cash accounting, the full cost of a purchase is shown up front, while under capital accounting only the amortized cost (the amount consumed in the first year) is reflected up front. Therefore, under capital accounting, whenever there is room under the budget-year spending caps, it is tempting to add capital investment because of the many jobs apparently created⁽⁵⁾ at what appears to be very low cost, just the first-year amortization of the capital investment.

    Conversely, if tight caps force budget cuts, capital projects may be spared for the same reason. It is impossible to cut current "amortization allowances," derived from prior capital investment, being charged to the current budget. And cutting new capital investment gets very little scored savings. In short, by reducing the first-year scoring of capital investment, capital budget accounting appears to gives capital goods an advantage at the margin over consumption programs.

    We acknowledge a couple of caveats to the foregoing analysis.

    (1) The apparent budget advantage of capital investments may not occur in reality.

    Budget caps apply to "budget authority" and to "outlays." Budget authority represents the amount of obligations that an agency may incur while outlays reflect the checks issued to liquidate those obligations -- that is, payments made as progress on contracts is achieved.

    Budget authority is especially important because in our system, the Appropriations Committees directly decide only the level of funding -- budget authority -- for a program. The Office of Management and Budget then apportions that budget authority to the agencies, and budget officers in each agency must ensure that the contracts they sign (or other obligations they incur) do not exceed the funding apportioned to them. In short, budget authority is the congressional and executive method for determining and controlling agency budgets.

    Suppose that capital outlays are amortized over the lifetime of the investment, but that the budget authority for a capital investment -- representing the total cost of the investment -- continues to be reflected up front, in the first year. If so, capital budget accounting will not give capital investment a comparative advantage over consumption (unless the budget authority caps are too loose to be meaningful).⁽⁶⁾

    Furthermore, if this Commission embraces capital accounting as the correct concept for measuring budget authority as well as outlays, it must also decide (i) how spending authority for capital budget items will be granted from the Congress to the Executive Branch; and (ii) how the management policies implemented under the Anti-Deficiency Act through the concept of budget authority can be maintained.

    The current system may be biased already toward physical investment. Outlay caps are often tighter than budget authority caps, and CBO and OMB estimates of the outlays that flow from a given level of budget authority turn out to provide the real constraint on the level of funding. Physical investment usually means new construction. For construction projects, the estimated outlays are typically very small in the first year when the project is just getting started. As a result, those projects already have an advantage over consumption programs such as veterans health care, for which the outlays appear immediately.

(a) It is much harder to measure the rate at which non-physical capital is "consumed." R&D becomes obsolete as it is overtaken by new technology. Education becomes obsolete as knowledge advances, and as people forget what they have learned. Some have tried to calculate rates of amortization for education, job training, and scientific research, but there is little consensus about the results.

(b) Because there is little consensus on how to amortize certain types of capital investment, there will be a very large possibility of manipulation. For an item as concrete as an aircraft carrier, one can justify an amortization schedule that stretches from 15 to 40 years. Amortization schedules for education, research, and job training are even more given to manipulation. Will amortization schedules be written into statute (and be subject to logrolling)? Will they be calculated by OMB and be subject to change as political whims at the White House change? Cash accounting has its shortcomings, but it is rigorously simple, and it checks the temptation to manipulate.

(3) Even if there is a consensus that the federal government has overconsumed and underinvested, the imbalance can be addressed in other ways. For example, the General Accounting Office suggests that budget rules which currently set targets for funding through the annual appropriations process could instead have separate targets for investment and consumption.

    Capital budgeting could also assist agencies in making trade-offs among competing uses of resources, particularly those with downstream benefits. But the planning tool best suited for this purpose is cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis does not require amortization of capital costs. To the contrary, capital costs are treated as incurred when paid for, on a cash basis, and these up-front capital costs are then compared to the stream of benefits, which are priced and reduced to a present value by an appropriate discount rate. Capital budgeting is aimed at allocating capital costs over the useful life of the capital goods. This is of little use in cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis allocates capital goods to the time period they are paid for, and then tries to determine if the value of future benefit stream exceeds the present value of the capital goods.
 
 

    On balance, it seems better to keep the federal budget on a cash basis, especially for purposes of congressional decision-making.

    However, experimenting with capital budget accounting at the agency level may aid budget making and planning. For example, by booking capital assets and calculating depreciation, the Defense Department would have one means of telling if its research, development, and procurement budgets provide adequately for replacement of its depreciating assets. Rather than applying capital budgeting to the whole of the federal budget, it might be tried experimentally in this one area of the budget where capital purchasing is concentrated: defense research, development, and procurement. But capital budgeting is of minor value when agencies use the most common analytical tool for weighing the merits of public investment: cost-benefit analysis. In any event, the Administration has devoted a good deal of resources to aggregate budget analyses of various types of investment. These are published in the annual Analytical Perspectives. It may be useful to enhance these analyses as a supplement to but not as a substitute for the cash-based system of budgeting.

    For purposes of getting a better look at the meaning of aggregate federal spending, surpluses, or deficits, the results that derive from capital budget accounting are so small that he disadvantages may outweigh the advantages. To review, these are our concerns:

    (1) The government would still require a budget expressed in budget authority -- scored up front, as it is now, and representing the full amount of the authority to incur and obligation -- because Congress requires this concept to appropriate and the Executive Branch uses it to manage agency spending and obligations of money.

    (2) To the extent that capital accounting lends itself to deferral of costs to future taxpayers, it is questionable and certainly not desirable in view of the impending retirement of baby boomers.

    (3) Capital budget accounting can be manipulated. The amortization schedules that would be used by the Executive Branch or the Congress are subject to considerable manipulation, at great risk to the integrity of the system.

    (4) The practical effect of capital accounting appears to be to be a scorekeeping advantage to capital investments, a bias that already exists in many cases.

    (5) The idea of capital accounting is to distinguish spending with only immediate benefits from spending with long-term benefits. But the distinction is problematic. No definition of capital captures that distinction, and many intangible investments, seldom treated as capital, generate substantial benefits into the future.

1. Representative Spratt is Ranking Democratic Member of the House Budget Committee; Mr. Kogan is Director of Policy of the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee. The authors do not intend that the views expressed in this testimony should be taken as representing the views of the Budget Committee, nor does each author necessarily subscribe to every point made in this testimony.

2. "Cash" includes checks and "near checks" such as food stamps. It also includes IOUs: if, for example, the government pays a contractor by giving him a Treasury bond rather than a check, the transfer of funds (transfer of wealth) takes place at that time, not 30 years later when the bond is redeemed. Treating the issuance of unconditional, guaranteed IOUs as equivalent to cash leads to the result that federal borrowing, which brings in cash, does not reduce the deficit because it is offset dollar-for-dollar by the issuance of Treasury securities. The government cannot borrow its way out of debt.

The principle of recognizing IOU's as equivalent to cash also means that the government records non-traditional IOU's (e.g. a non-marketable security, a "monetary credit," or a lease-purchase contract) as though it were a cash expenditure, financed by borrowing. Taken one step further, this principle also leads to so-called "credit scorekeeping," in which the cost of a federal loan is offset by the IOU (the loan asset) the government gets in return. In this case, the IOU issued by the borrower is worth less than face value because of a higher risk of default (and possibly because of interest rate differentials). The difference in value between the loan payment and the offsetting IOU constitutes a government subsidy or cost. From this perspective, credit scorekeeping is not an example of accrual accounting, but rather an example of up-front, cash accounting in which all IOUs are broadly construed to be a type of cash.

3. The conception of a separate "capital budget" also facilitates the erroneous notion that it is appropriate -- perhaps necessary -- to borrow to finance the purchase of new capital.

4. The rationale for capital budget accounting would be stated differently by an economist, but would have essentially the same meaning. That argument would go as follows: The amount of net national saving (private saving plus government surpluses or minus government deficits) constitutes the pool of money available for private-sector investment. In general, higher investment leads to faster increases in productivity, and from there to faster real economic growth. Thus, over time, the government can contribute to future prosperity by reducing deficits or increasing surpluses.

If the underlying purpose is to increase net national saving, however, the federal budget should be measured in a way to facilitate that result. Consumption should be measured on a cash basis, but that federal investment which is equivalent to private-sector investment (e.g., transportation, education, scientific research, etc.) should be recognized as contributing to national saving. More precisely, a new federal capital investment of $10 billion requires that amount of federal borrowing -- thus decreasing national saving available for private-sector investment by $10 billion -- but it increases public investment by $10 billion. The increase and decrease net to zero. Therefore, the budget should not reflect capital investment expenditures as an outlay when they are made, because they do not decrease net national saving at that time. It follows that those capital expenditures should be reflected as an outlay later, when they are consumed (when they depreciate), because that is the time when the nation's capital stock shrinks.

One consequence of this rationale, as pointed out by the General Accounting Office, is that we should amortize only that capital which is equivalent to private-sector investment in its effect on future productivity, e.g. roads, scientific research, education, job training. Under this concept, capital used primarily by the federal government (e.g. military hardware, federal courthouses, etc.) would not be amortized because it is not the equivalent of private-sector saving/investment.

5. There are many circumstances in which an increase in federal spending, for example on a new construction project, will not increase the total number of jobs in the nation. For example, one would not expect an increase in total employment if the new spending is offset by a reduction in other spending or by a tax increase. Neither would one expect an increase in total employment if the Federal Reserve chooses to offset the increased fiscal stimulus with monetary contraction. But if all politics is local, then proponents of a particular project will see local job increases and may not care about offsetting decreases elsewhere.

6. Because the budget authority and outlay caps are set years in advance by fallible humans, there is often a mismatch. More often than not, any given level of appropriations will be estimated to run up against the outlay cap while there is still room under the budget authority cap. In effect, then, if budget authority for capital investment continues to be recorded up front, in most years capital projects will have a relative advantage but in other years they won't.