Balancing the Budget
From Dave (Warner Bros.)
Categories:
Run time: 4:05
Note: At just over four minutes this is one of the longer clips in the library. Set a stop point before class.
Clip Description: Dave, an ordinary man standing in for the president, brings in his own accountant and goes through the federal budget line by line looking for savings, treating it the way a small business owner would treat a ledger.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: Discretionary versus mandatory spending; why the federal budget is not a household ledger; the political constituency attached to every line; the difference between a deficit and a debt, and between authorization and appropriation.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Reliably productive on the first day of a budget unit, because students agree with Dave and then have to discover why the method does not scale. Have the discretionary-versus-mandatory pie chart ready to put up the moment the clip ends.
Discussion Questions
- The scene finds savings by going line by line. What share of the federal budget is actually available to that method, and what is the rest?
- Every line has a constituency. Pick one cut proposed in the scene and name who would fight it and what they would say.
- The film treats budgeting as a problem of will rather than of arithmetic. Make the case that it is right, then the case that it is wrong.
Assignment
Use the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent budget options report. Pick three options that together close a meaningful share of the deficit. Two pages: what each saves, who bears the cost, and what the political obstacle is. Close by saying which of your three you would actually expect to pass and why the other two would not — and be specific about the mechanism that stops them, not just the unpopularity.
Clip hosted on YouTube, posted by Movieclips.
For AP Students
AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 2: Interactions Among Branches of Government
Topics: 2.7 Roles and Powers of the President; 2.3 Congressional Behavior; policy-making and the federal budget
A clean illustration of the gap between what a president can propose and what a president can enact, which the CED treats as central to the relationship between the branches.
Discussion questions
- Distinguish mandatory from discretionary spending and say roughly what share of federal outlays each accounts for. Which one does a president have the most influence over, and by what route?
- Explain the steps of the federal budget process from the president’s request to enacted appropriations. Name the point at which the president’s proposal has the least force.
- Entitlement spending grows without any vote being taken. Explain why, and say what that does to the incentives of a member of Congress facing reelection.
Short activity
Where the money actually is (15 minutes). Put six spending categories on the board and have students guess each one’s share of federal outlays before you reveal the figures. Then ask which of the six a line-by-line review could reach. The gap between where students look for savings and where the money sits is the entire lesson, and it lands harder when they wrote their guesses down first.