HOAGLAND, G. William <br/><br/>
A Comment on "The Great Unraveling :  federal budgeting, 1998-2006" 

 - Malden, MA :  Blackwell Publishers,  july / aug. 2007 
<br/><br/> To declare that the federal budgetary process is in utter shambles based principally on an analysis of a six-year interval during a single presidential administration, as Professor Irene Rubin does in the preceding article, is unfair to history and misleading. Drawing on significant budgetary experience as a U.S. Senate staff member, the author of this essay argues that (1) the contributions of emergency appropriations and earmarks to the federal budgetary imbalance are overstated, (2) the goal of perpetual budgetary balance is unsound policy, and (3) budgets—inevitably the result of a political process—are artifacts reflecting societal priorities at a given point in time