A policy document allocating burdens (such as taxes) and benefits (such as expenditures).
What is a budget?
100
A 1935 law intended to provide a minimal level of sustenance to older Americans ands thus save them from poverty.
What is the Social Security Act?
100
The House of Representatives committee that, along with the Senate Finance Committee, writes the tax codes, subject to the approval of Congress as a whole.
What is the House Ways and Means Committee?
100
All the money borrowed by the federal government over the years and still outstanding.
What is the national debt?
100
"A hierarchical authority structure that uses task specialization, operates on the merit principle, and behaves with impersonality"
What is the bureaucracy?
200
Government spending. Major areas of federal spending are social services and national defense.
What is an expenditure?
200
A program added in 1965 that provides health insurance for the elderly, covering hospitalization, doctor fees, and other health expenses.
What is Medicare?
200
A resolution binding Congress to a total expenditure level, supposedly the bottom line of all federal spending for all programs.
What is a budget resolution?
200
A legislative limit on the amount of national debt that can be issued by the United States treasury.
What is the United States debt limit?
200
A theory of government and politics contending that groups are so strong that government, seeking to please them all, is thereby weakened.
What is hyperpluralism?
300
An excess of federal expenditures over federal revenues.
What is a deficit?
300
Policies for which Congress has obligated itself to pay X level of benefits to Y number of recipients.
What is an entitlement?
300
An act of Congress that actually funds programs within limits established by authorization bills, usually covering one year.
What is an appropriations bill?
300
The financial resources of the government. The individual income tax and Social Security tax are two major financial resources used by the federal government.
What is revenue?
300
A convention for selecting convention delegates used in about a dozen states in which voters must attend an open meeting to express their presidential preference.
What is a caucus?
400
The constitutional amendment adopted in 1913 that explicitly permitted Congress to levy an income tax.
What is the Sixteenth Amendment?
400
A description of the budget process in which the best predictor of this year's budget is last year's budget, plus a little bit more.
What is incrementalism?
400
When Congress cannot reach agreement and pass appropriations bills, these resolutions allow agencies to spend at the level of the previous year.
What is a continuing resolution?
400
A congressional process through which program authorizations are revised to achieve required savings. It usually also includes tax or other revenue adjustments.
What is reconciliation?
400
A federal law prohibiting government employees from active participation in partisan politics while on duty or for employees in sensitive positions at any time.
What is the Hatch Act?
500
Revenue losses that result from special exemptions, exclusions, or deductions allowed by federal tax law.
What is a tax expenditure?
500
Expenditures that are determined by how many eligible beneficiaries there are for a program or by previous obligations of the government and that Congress therefore cannot easily control.
What is an uncontrollable expenditure?
500
Advises Congress on the probable consequences of its decisions, forecasts revenues, and is a counterweight to the president's Office of Management and Budget.
What is the Congressional Budget Office?
500
The Senate committee that, along with the House Ways and Means Committee, writes the tax codes, subject to approval of Congress as a whole.
What is the Senate Finance Committee?
500
A 1989 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a law banning the burning of the American flag on the grounds that such action was symbolic speech protected by the first amendment.