Budget

"[For] the first time in the history of humanity... you have just had a single empire [the United States of America], so dominant, whose military budget is higher than the military budgets of the next 15 countries put together, and whose military-industrial complex itself is the eleventh largest economic entity in the world. This is the reality we live in, and this is the reality which confronts us in different ways."

"is, of course, a made-up word designed to call attention to the various functional elements of the work of a chief executive because "administration" and "management" have lost all specific content. POSDCORB is made up of the initials and stands for the following activities:"

"Budgeting is a math exercise, number crunching. Planning is a logical, linear process. Strategizing requires a great deal of information about customers and competitors, along with conceptual skills. Visioning uses a very different part of the brain than budgeting. As the name implies, it involves trying to see possible futures. It inevitably has both a creative and emotional component (e.g., “How do we feel about the options?”). When you use “orthodox planning” to create a vision, frustration and failure are inevitable."

"Henri Fayol (1949) is generally considered as the father of planning. As early as 1917, he led a nationally owned French mining concern from the brink of bankruptcy to international dominance. This was clearly the result of his development of a specific system. This system involved forecasts from various levels and persons within the organization. Managers from each level submitted their best estimates of the coming years activity and, based on this information, the Chief Executive Officer would make up a one to five year plan. Financial evaluations and control of departments were then based upon these projections. Based on the business practices and policies of 1917, this was a radical and unsettling approach. Prior to Fayol’s innovation, the charisma and entrepreneurial abilities of the firm’s leadership was believed to be the major factor leading to its success. As more firms became corporations and the size of business entities continued to grow, Fayol’s planning approach became widely accepted. General Motors adopted this approach (during the 1930s and 1940s and provided an excellent example of this (Sloane, 1963) in the United States. Since World War II, the evolution of planning approaches can be viewed as three distinct phases (Camillus, 1986). The first of these phases lasted through the 1950s and was, in actuality, an evolution of Fayol’s approach. Its base of operation was in the accounting department of a business. Budgeting and financial projections were used by management to develop future projections and to control operational decisions. From this writer’s experience, this appears to he the primary planning process used in the field of child and youth care today. How many of our present day agencies are operated (in reality) by a business office..."

"A sovereign government's budget is not like the budget of a household or firm. Governments issue the currency, whereas households and firms use the currency. As the chartalist, or modern money approach, explains, modern governments actually spend by crediting bank accounts. It really just amounts to a keystroke, pushing a key on a computer that generates an entry on someone’s balance sheet. Government can never run out of these keystrokes."