Government: Comparison of Three Budgets Term Paper

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The State of Nevada and Clark County appear to have a different manner of meeting budget deficiencies. The Office of Budget and Management has an amount of finances reserved for supplemental and emergency funding, at a total of $153.1 billion dollars. Neither Clark County nor the State of Nevada appears to have emergency or supplemental funding in their budgets.

State of Nevada

The budget for the State of Nevada is larger than Clark County. The total 2006 budget for the State of Nevada is reported to be $2,400 million dollars with a deficit of -2.3%. The state of Nevada's transportation budget for 2006 was $4.6 million dollars; agriculture $21.1 million; education $56.6 million; health and human services $69.2 million; and $21.0 million for justice programs. These amounts are considerably higher than Clark County in comparison. The State of Nevada's Department of Business and Industry recently released a new prevailing wage rate for public works projects for Nevada's 17 counties. The rate increase was based on survey responses submitted by contractors in Nevada's construction industry regarding wages paid on non-residential construction projects. These rates go into effect on October 1, 2006 and the State of Nevada plans to post these rates ahead of time to give people a chance to look at the need for any clerical or technical corrections before they go into effect. This differs from the smaller budget of Clark County, who appears to not have the means to conduct a survey such as this one to evaluate a wage increase. Clark County relies on its CIP program to look for ways to decrease budget spending, not increase wages.

The White House's Office of Budget and Management

The White House's Office of Budget and Management has the largest budget and revenue income of the three governmental branches examined. For 2006, the defense/military budget was $410.8 billion dollars; homeland security was $30.5 billion dollars; housing and urban development was $34.1 billion dollars; veterans affairs was $33.
1 billion dollars; environmental protection agency was $7.6 billion dollars, and social security administration was $6.9 billion dollars. This differs from the budgets of Clark County and State of Nevada in that these budgets do not even include for programs such as these. Therefore, the budget of the Office of Budget and Management is automatically much larger because it includes government-funded federal programs that the local governments do not include. The total amount of discretionary spending for the Office of Budget and Management in 2006 was $843 billion dollars, up from the $644 billion spent in 2005. The Office notes that there is a small policy change to their budget spending as a result of additional funding for the Global War on Terror. Funding for the Global War on terror did not affect the budgets of either Clark County of the State of Nevada, at least not directly.

Additionally, the budget of the Office of Budget and Management appears to be much larger than the other two, for this office has a discretionary budget authority. For 2006, the discretionary budget for the Department of Defense was $140 billion; for Homeland Security, #32.1 billion; and $400 billion for "other operations of government." The most notable difference between the budgets of all three governmental branches was the fact that the Office of Budget and Management has supplemental funding and emergency funding in the amounts of $120 billion for the Global War on Terror; $24 billion for hurricane response; $6 billion for pandemic flu preparedness; and $2 billion for border security. The total amount for 2006 for supplemental and emergency funding was $153 billion. Finally, the budget of the Office of Budget and Management is no doubt the largest of the three budgets examined in this paper.

Bibliography

Clark County (2006). Clark County. Retrieved September 22, 2006, from Nevada's Clark County

Website: http://www.co.clark.nv.us/.

Office.....

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