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Acknowledgments

Imagine that you are standing before an audience of students or of the general citizenry and you ask whether they think Congress has done a little or a lot to reduce the deficit. Virtually 100 percent say "Little or nothing." They are wrong, as the reader will see, but in this respect their reply is only a tiny part of the flood of misinformation about the deficit that we seek to correct here—misinformation joined to a kind of collective amnesia in which only a few of the major events of the past decades, and virtually none of the budgeting decisions except the tax cuts, survive in public consciousness.

We try to remedy the lack of public memory by providing detailed accounts of decisions and of how budgets were made and unmade. The errors in what is remembered have led us to exercise exceptional care in assembling the facts. Because of the attention paid to taxing and spending at the time, there is a considerable public record on which to rely, including many published interviews with leading participants. We cite reports in the major media not only to verify facts that could be obtained from numerous (and, some readers have told us, more respectable) sources but also to show what politicians were reading and saying to one another at the time.

In order to probe more deeply, we also conducted 112 interviews with people in the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, the executive departments, and Congress. These discussions, sometimes lasting several hours, took place on condition that we not attribute them to their sources. It seemed more important to us to get closer to the truth than to attach names to interviews. Nevertheless, we have followed certain precautions: where different interviews bear each other out, we have so indicated; where sources conflict, we have let the reader know. By and large, once given the essential clues, we have been able to track down


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the relevant information in published sources. Let us put the matter another way: there is much greater distance between the information available in numerous published sources and public discussion of the deficit than there is between different participants' versions of events.

We thank those participants who sought to enlighten us even at the risk of failing to persuade us of their interpretation of events. We are especially grateful to congressional staff members who devoted more time than we had a right to expect in order to explain the intricacies of budgeting matters as only they know them. We have tried to repay the gift of their time by providing an account that meets their standards.

Because we sought to recreate these events in lifelike detail, giving the reader the context as well as the facts themselves, our first draft was half again as large as this book. The reader must therefore sympathize with those who read the entire manuscript with a critical eye: Naomi Caiden, Donald W. Moran, Lawrence Malkin, Irene Rubin, Allen Schick, and anonymous reviewers from the Russell Sage Foundation and the University of California Press. A number of other people read selected chapters: Ron King, Theodore Marmor, William Niskanen, Richard Rose, and Murray Weidenbaum. They helped us improve our prose and straighten our line of argument. No one would dream of holding any of these responsible for a book that runs so strongly counter to the contemporary trend of finding fault with public officials, sometimes even excusing those who have faulted themselves.

Without the financial assistance of the Russell Sage Foundation, which gave a three-year grant to Aaron Wildavsky, the research for this book could not have been undertaken. Special thanks go to the presidents of the Foundation, Marshall Robinson, who helped get this project started, and Eric Wanner, who helped maintain it. When something happened that knowledgeable people believed could never occur, that is, tax reform, or never imagined might take place, namely, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, the Ford Foundation came to our rescue with a last-minute infusion of funds.

Aaron Wildavsky wishes to express his gratitude to the institutions at the University of California in Berkeley that sustained him during the years of research and writing a book of this kind requires: the Political Science Department, the Graduate School of Public Policy, and the Survey Research Center. They provided support for secretarial assistance, research, endless trips to the library, even longer telephone conversations; most of all, they accepted the not-always-self-evident proposition that something new could and should be said about federal budgeting.

There is no way to account for the innumerable conversations about budgets and deficits through which colleagues helped clarify our thoughts. John Gilmour, Duane Oldfield, and James Savage, then graduate


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students and now colleagues in the political science profession, went back and forth with us over numerous issues and read several chapters in the critical way that only those who are exceptionally knowledgeable and who are getting their own back can muster. Naomi Caiden gave us her friendship as well as her discerning comments about what was really happening in the world of budgeting. Our debt to colleagues in the study of budgeting and national politics will be evident from footnotes. Here we would like to single out the helpful and eminent group employed by Congress at the Congressional Research Service. Our counselors there included Stanley Bach, Louis Fisher, Robert Keith, and our late and dearly missed friend Charles Levine. Congress is well served.

Joseph White researched and wrote part of this book in Berkeley, but most of his work was done at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where he was first a student fellow and then a staff member. Thanks to the hospitality of the two directors of the Brookings Governmental Studies Program, Paul Peterson and Thomas Mann, the two authors were able to work together during Aaron Wildavsky's frequent visits to Washington to interview and to discuss the research with his coauthor. Above all, Brookings gave Joseph White a home within that remarkable community of scholars. Among the many advisers found there—whether the authors' questions involved defense or welfare, process or purpose—good ideas came in a constant stream from Edward M. Bernstein, Daniel Brill, Joshua M. Epstein, Robert Katzmann, James M. Lindsay, Lawrence Malkin, Ken Mayer, David Menefee-Libey, Joseph Pechman, Paul Pierson, Robert Reischauer, Alice Rivlin, Mark Rom, Yahya Sadowski, Steven S. Smith, R. Kent Weaver, Thomas Weko, and others who should be thanked. It is superfluous to say that neither they nor the Institution is responsible for the content of this book, if only because they did not agree with one another and the authors often did not agree with them even while benefiting from their association.


A personal word from Joseph White: My brother, Michael J. White, has more to do than anyone else with what good I have managed to accomplish. From the time he taught me to read and do math and play chess, through my 3:00 A.M. talks with him when he got home from driving a cab while he was in college, through my own rough years in college and after, as, finally, I perhaps figured out what to do with my life, my older brother has been a joy and support. Beyond everything else, his eagerness to see the world clearly is the greatest gift he has offered me, and I have tried to seize it.


A dedication from Aaron Wildavsky: I would like to dedicate my half of the book to Daniel J. Tenenberg for his friendship and wisdom. Dan


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has helped me see more clearly the difference between the versions of the public interest discussed here, from doing what other people think is good for them to doing what one thinks is good for others, especially when they don't like it. For an explanation of why that difference is central to understanding the battle of the budget, the dominant political issue of the 1980s, read on.


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