Purpose
The primary purpose of the budget is to create an overview of the country's revenues and expenses for the following fiscal year or years. Since the budget is based on past expenditures, it is merely a prediction of the future which can lead to unexpected budget deficits as the fiscal year progresses. In the short term, such deficits are commonly financed by borrowing money which has led to the significant long-term debt of the German federal government.
Read more about this topic: German Budget Process
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now,
was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show
virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and
body of the time his form and pressure.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
“Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)