This is a paper I wrote on King's book about budgeting entitlements for one of my master of public administration courses.

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Review of Budgeting Entitlements: The Politics of Food Stamps
James W. Crowson
This paper will offer an explanation of Budgeting Entitlements’ significance, budget making as a
political process, three different types of budgetary rules, tensions between welfare benefits
and expenditures, reversion points in political budgeting, and King’s models of institution and
ideology.
This is a book about food stamps and how the political machine in
Congress and in the White House has affected this program. Welfare and
politics manifests itself as tension between helping the poor eat and the
fiscal problems and responsibility that brings to bear. The models King uses
to explain this story include an institutional view and ideological view, which
I develop extensively in this paper to highlight the differences in the main
forms of budgetary rules.
Budgeting Entitlements is significant is because King has used the food
stamp program to discuss the political process of the US federal budget
making process on a level which is understandable to the common person.
Just about anyone can use the research to generalize for understanding of
other federal budget process studies. The book is also significant because of
the problem that welfare and budgeting represents as a dichotomy. King’s
message about the difficulties that Americans have with the food stamp
program is also about whether Americans want to see themselves as
treating the less fortunate and/or poor humanely (King R. , 2000, p. 31), but
that comes with a price tag many are not willing to continue paying.

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The budget making process as King explains it tends to be very
political. The food stamp program ran smoothly during the 1960s and
through the 1970s. However, from FY 1974 to FY 1977, expenditures rose
by roughly 90%, from $2.8 billion to $5.4 billion. By FY 1981, expenditures
had risen nearly 110% up to $11.3 billion. Much of this increase is accounted
for because of the external factors such as inflation during the Carter
administration (King R. , 2000, p. 63). The response from lawmakers was to
create spending caps legislation as part of an across the board measure to
contain federal entitlement spending, decrease the national debt and treat
the ever-increasing spending deficit.
King lays out his case by explaining three different types of budgetary
rules Congress instituted to try to manage food stamp program spending,
which are discretionary spending, entitlement spending, and spending caps.
Discretionary means that Congress decides every year during the annual
budget process how much in outlays the food stamp program will receive.
This means that there are no guarantees to how much the program will
receive in appropriations. It can be an especially challenging situation for
Americans who are verifiably needy for food stamps, and it is hardly
equitable because once the money runs out, there is no more until next year
or an emergency appropriation. (King R. , 2000, p. 2).
Unlike discretionary spending which has the potential to be
inequitable, the food stamp program as an entitlement means that no one is

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left out that is eligible to receive these benefits. Again, contrary to
discretionary budgeting, entitlement means that if the money runs out, then
Congress will appropriate more money thereby circumventing the normal
budgeting process (King R. , 2000, p. 2).
Capped spending for entitlements involves taking a hard look at the
benefits society receives against the costs. Caps permit the government to
spend for welfare up to a certain point, and if that point is reached, then
either benefits or enrollments must be reduced until new legislation can be
enacted (King R. , 2000, p. 2).
King also draws out the tensions between secure welfare benefits and
constrained expenditure growth that has not been held in check but instead
in abeyance (King R. , 2000, p. 154). He says that this tension is
fundamental and thus cannot simply be as a result of greater attention. King
compares and contrasts spending caps effectiveness to welfare protections.
First, he says that caps perhaps function effectively when they can restrict
entitlement spending during times of cost explosions (King R. , 2000, p. 8).
Next, welfare functions effectively only to the extent that the
entitlement spending can be guaranteed in spite of budget constraints.
Entitlements and budgeting are excellent examples of the inherent tensions
between social responsibility and fiscal restraint. Last, no legislative

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procedure will dissolve these tensions nor will it require care and reason to
prevent them (King R. , 2000).
King uses the concept of a reversion point to explain situations of
noncooperation, such as when no agreements can be reached. A reversion
point can be understood as a statistical and/or symbolic measure to show
where spending limits are reached. King discusses reversion points in the
context of the three budget rules, discretion, entitlement, and spending caps
(King R. , 2000).
In the matter of discretionary spending, the reversion point would be
restarting the authorization and appropriation process over each year with
new funding. Under this rule, when lawmakers cannot agree on
appropriations, it will tend to have the most negative consequences upon
program operations (King R. , 2000, pp. 10, 31-34, 72).
With entitlement status, the reversion point always varies directly with
the number of program participants. If agreements between lawmakers
cannot be reached, the impact is virtually nil or zero. Therefore, “aggressive
play” is permitted to occur by the president and members of Congress
because there is no incentive otherwise (King R. , 2000, pp. 31-34, 72).
With spending caps, the reversion point is the ceiling or highest
amount of outlays authorized for that year. In terms of behavior, King says
one would hope this type of rule is in between discretion and entitlement,

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but does not necessarily produce restraint of unnecessary costs or efficiency
(King R. , 2000, pp. 31-34, 72).
The reversion point in the context of the three different budgetary
rules is important to understand because each rule shows that actors’
incentives to politicize vary according to the budget rule in effect at the time.
For example, the political risks and benefits are greater when food stamps
are budgeted with discretionary spending. While that may be true, it is the
complete opposite case with entitlements. With entitlements, all actors know
that the appropriation continues until acted upon by statute to change that
automatic appropriation process (King R. , 2000, p. 30).
Institutional rules play an important role in the development of King’s
argument. He says that the food stamp program is an outcome of the
strategies that actors employ to arrive at their collective decisions. For
example, King says that institutional rules can modify bargaining relations
among interested actors, thereby changing the way they approach and
negotiate with rivals and the outcomes they achieve in the legislative game
playing (King R. , 2000, p. 25).
Under the institutional model, King argues that it is important to
understand why the actors involved make budget decisions the way they do
under discretionary spending. We can understand this better by asking if the
actors are really honest about their budget proposals. For example, the

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budget actors include the president, Congress, and the top bureaucratic
agencies and heads, and others, but these are the main actors. The agencies
can be honest or not honest about how much funding they require. King
argues that under discretionary spending the agencies do not have an
incentive to underestimate costs; however, they may try to overestimate the
costs for contingencies or program expansion (King R. , 2000, p. 230).
Under entitlement spending, Congress tends to underestimate future
obligations as a means to make sure they have active participation in
coming fiscal years (King R. , 2000, pp. 100-101). This may produce a
frenzied rush to make sure that enough money is authorized and
appropriated when under discretionary spending and spending caps, but this
is not the case with food stamps as an entitlement program.
Under spending caps, institutional rules constrain actors from creating
and implementing substantive budgetary reform. King says that optimists
may hope that legislators would create new institutional rules for reform, but
instead in the real world of politics, they lack responsible policymaking (King
R. , 2000, pp. 29-31).
Whereas one can understand how institutional politics has affected the
food stamp program, now let’s look at how political ideology affects it. This
is where partisan politics factors into the budget making process. King goes
to great lengths to explain this and provides a one-dimensional linear map,
which is helpful imagery to an otherwise abstract budget process. Again let’s

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unpack these budget rules from the context of the three budget rules. Under
discretionary spending constraints, a liberal Congress will tend to prefer
more appropriation the left, while a conservative president will fall to the
right of King’s map, thus wanting to reduce welfare outlays (King R. , 2000,
pp. 31-39).
Under entitlements, spending is set by statute and varies directly with
the number of people who receive transfer payments. In this case, the
president does not have any negotiating power because of the statutory or
mandatory spending requirement of entitlements. The reversion point is set
by default and produces the effect of Congress being non-participatory with
the president. The only situation where this would not be the case is if the
president possessed the line-item veto (King R. , 2000, pp. 31-39).
However, he cannot have the line-item veto because that act was invalidated
by the US Supreme Court in Clinton v. New York City.
Under spending caps, again it is a situation of a liberal Congress
versus the conservative president. But in this case, the reversion point is to
the far right. This can work to the benefit of the president when bargaining.
The “sweet spot” for the president is “P” on King’s map. The president will
negotiate for spending to the right of “x” while Congress will reject it. The
realm between “x” and “P” is probably acceptable for the president, while
the space away from “Qc” to the left is desirable for Congress (King, 2000,
pp. 32-39).

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In conclusion, King’s study of the politics of food stamps can also be
called the fiscalization of welfare. It is also a study much like trying to
understand the tax code, very difficult to understand as a whole, but easier
when approaching it piece by piece or by specific types of program. The food
stamp program is one piece of legislation, and so discussing the federal
budget process with such a familiar example as food stamps makes
generalizing King’s central message of politics in the food stamp budget
process easier to understand and applicable to studying other areas of the
federal budget, not just social welfare programs.
From Roosevelt’s New Deal administration and the creation of
entitlements to Johnson’s Great Society, America has had unprecedented
increases in entitlement spending in large part due to the fiscalization of
welfare. The issue with King is not that so much money is being spent, but
instead the processes by which the money is appropriated and the ethical
argument that can be made if that money is not spent.
The food stamp program is an argument for better treatment of the
poor, less fortunate, and those who need it for any other reason life
presents. An important question to ask is can Americans really be the city on
a hill for others, if it cannot take care of its own? Maybe or maybe not, but in
either case, what is the cost, or who will pay?

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Works Cited
King, R. (2000). Budget Entitlements: The Politics of Food Stamps. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press.