Public policy and the budget

На русском языке.

II. Письменно своими словами изложите основное содержание текста

I. Прочитайте текст. Опираясь на информацию текста, найдите

Text B

ЗАДАНИЯ К ТЕКСТУ

ответы на следующие вопросы:

1. What kind of information does the US national budget document contain? ____________________________________________________________

2. What is the general procedure of submitting budget to the Congress?

___________________________________________________________

3. What are the roles of the committees involved in budget making?

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III. Задайте к тексту 6 – 7 вопросов разного типа.

(1) For most people the national budget is boring. To national politicians it is an exciting script for high drama. The budget is a political battlefield, on which politicians and the programs they support wage war. The national budget is a complicated document. In different countries it is prepared by different authorities. For example, in the United States the President prepares budget and the Congress approves it. The Congress as a body might disagree with presidential spending priorities.

(2) The budget of the United States Government is an annual financial document that the president is required to submit to the Congress each January. The budget may contain up to fifteen hundred pages long and weigh more than five pounds, including appendixes. Broadly, the budget defines budget authorities (how much government agencies are authorized to spend for programs), budget outlays, or expenditures (how much they are expected to spend), and receipts (how much is expected in taxes and other revenues). The budget document contains more than numbers. It also explains individual spending programs in terms of national needs and agency objectives, and it analyzes proposed taxes and other receipts. Its publication is usually anxiously awaited by reporters, lobbyists, and political analysts eager to learn the president’s plan for government spending in the coming year.

(3) The budget that the president submits to the Congress each winter is the end product of a process that begins the previous spring under the supervision of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The OMB is located within the Executive Office of the President and is headed by a director who is appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate. The OMB, with a staff of over five hundred, is one of the most powerful figures in government. The OMB initiates the budget process each spring by meeting with the president to discuss the economic situation and his budgetary priorities. It then sends broad economic guidelines to every government agency and requests their initial projections of funds needed for the next fiscal year. The OMB assembles this information and makes recommendations to the president. By summer, the agencies are asked to prepare budgets based on the new guidelines. By the fall, they submit their formal budgets to the OMB, where budget analysts scrutinize agency requests for both costs and consistency with the president’s legislative program. A lot of politicking goes at this stage, as agency heads try to go around the OMB to plead for their pet projects with presidential advisers and perhaps even with the President himself.

(4) The voluminous document is carefully printed and neatly bound. It looks very much like a finished product, but it is far from final. Now the Congress must approve the budget. The process of approving the budget is full of traditional procedures overlaid with structural reforms.

(5) Traditionally, the tasks of budget making are divided among a number of committees; there are three types of committees involved in budgeting: tax committees, authorization committees, and appropriation committees. The tax committees are responsible for raising the revenues to run the government. So, they consider all proposals for taxes, tariffs, and other receipts contained in the president’s budget. Authorization committees authorize spending. There are nineteen authorization committees in the House and sixteen in the Senate that can authorize spending, each in its area of responsibility. In recent years, however, power has shifted from the authorization committees to the appropriation committees. Appropriation committees decide which of the programs approved by authorization committees will actually be funded [that is given money to spend]. The budget committees are supposed to propose an initial budget resolution that sets overall revenue and spending levels, broken down into twenty-one different “budget functions”, among them national defense, agriculture and health.

Примечание:

script (n) текст, сценарий.

wage war (v) вести войну

submit (v) представлять на рассмотрение

budget authorities бюджетные полномочия (разрешение на

расходование денег)

outlays (n) (pl) издержки, расходы

receipts (n) (pl) денежные поступления, доходы

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27