<論説>合衆國の予算制度 : 財務行政への一考察

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1. One of the most serious concerns of any modern state is about the national finance. For this reason. a sound fiscal management is regarded as the basic element of good government. The budget system has been developed as a means to meet this requirement. However, each nation has its own budget system different in structure and operation from those of other nations, according as its political, economic, social and other factors are different. Especially, as the budget system stands between the legislative control on one extreme and the executive management on the other, it carries within itself these contradictory forces. In order to analize the fiscal management, it seems necessary to study the budget systems of different nations in their historical perspectives and try to comprehend their problems in both their administrative and political outlooks. With this in view, this article is devoted to a study of the budget system of the United States of America in the hope of finding out the fundamentals of a good fiscal management. 2. First, reference is made to the budget system developed as America passed from her colonial status to the time when her Constitution was established. Suffering under the British feudal sway, the American colonials endeavored to secure their political freedom and establish their own democratic government, in such a manner as repeated the British bourgeois struggles for financial supremacy, which wove the British constitutional history. In the course of these political struggles against the government of their home country, the colonial people gradually won the freedom with which their legislature, which directly represented them, handled their own financial matters. This climaxed in the promulgation of the Constitution, which confirmed the principle of the supreme authority of the legislature, as a measure to insure democratic control of the national finance. However, the Constitution, which was the product of the compromise between the Federalists and Anti-federalists, had left the specified regulations for fiscal management to materialize in the course of the practical application of the principle. Though Hamilton attempted to make the authority and the function of the Secretary of the Treasury as strong and extensive as that of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was met by a strong opposition of the Republicans and failed to establish a strong and consolidated system of fiscal management. Furthermore, the Congress not only denied the President of the United States the authority to prepare and present a budget, but also deprived him of the authority to control the national expenditures. This may be to say that the people, opposed to the emergence of a powerful central government, agreed in entrusting the authority to manage the national finance, which was their main weapon, all to the Congress. Thus the United States came to have and operate a peculiar budget system. The budget, in the nature of things, may function only on the close cooperation between the Executive and the Legislature. When the Congress exercised both the legislative control of the budget and the main part of the executive management of it, it caused politics to invade into the realm of administration. Thus the Appropriations Committee, which was the Congressional standing committee, was closely tied up with each administrative agencies under its jurisdiction through evil political customs of the party politics, and utilized the national finance for their selfish profiteering. Yet the current notion of the government in those days as expressed by the catchword 'cheap government' protected even such a budget system from harsh criticism. 3. The disappearance of the frontier coupled with the growth of monopoly enterprizes in the 19th century gave rise to a number of new problems both economic and social, which, developing into political issues, demanded the Government to intervene and solve them. The resultant extension and
1953-09-20

<論説>合衆國の予算制度 : 財務行政への一考察

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