It's stupid that we lump annual on-going budgeting in with multi-year projects. Intuitively, we need a "capital budget" if we really want the federal budget to be more like a "family budget". For instance, people who make $50k a year don't suddenly go bankrupt when they take out a $200k 30 year mortgage...

Unfortunately, all of the analysis to date indicates that a federal capital budget will create more problems than it solves (e.g. the federal government doesn't own most of the capital stuff it pays for; mixtures of accounting methods; etc.).

http://www.brookings...bank_istrate.aspx

It's obvious that we need to spend a lot more on infrastructure than we've been doing. There are sensible ways to do so; this is a solvable problem if we have the will... <sigh>

Cheers,
Scott.