It certainly makes sense, but the behaviour that logic incentivizes leaves much to be desired.
If I go to the store today and buy groceries, it’ll cost X. If I go tomorrow as well, it’ll cost Y. The two numbers are barely related to each other. And only because I don’t need the things I bought yesterday.
And yes, that’s day to day. What about year to year?
Last year, I did not need any repairs to my house. This year I do. A few years ago, I needed a new roof. Three different year, three radically different home repair budgets.
The entire exercise is a refusal to due diligence of any sort. If you say $X/yr, then you don’t have to ask why. You don’t have to scrutinize reasons. Then everything becomes about adjusting this number without ever asking what it is being used for.
Consider instead that you're part of a co-op and your responsibility is to buy the groceries always. Someone else does the home repairs. Someone else keeps all the cars fueled. Someone else pays the utility bill. There are fifty different people with responsibilities. Sometimes there will also be "You must spend $100 on supplies for an event on July 17th."
On January 1, you get all the money that you will get for the year to buy groceries. How much do you ask the co-op board for?
Government doesn't see it as one big account, but rather "this is how much we get, this is how much we allocate to the different accounts."
Home budgets work differently. There's one pool of money and if you have an expense you can skimp on another part of the budget. Had to get a plumber? Hold back on going to the movies for a few weeks. You can't do "we had a natural disaster so we're short on money and not going to pay the prison guards for a few weeks."
But to take the example of your roof - in a business scenario, you would amortize that expense over the number of years you expect the roof to last. 15 years means you'd take 1/15 (and probably multiply by the inflation rate to account for rising costs) and put that into your annual budget request.
Actually year of year it makes more sense because anomalies are averaged out over time.
I also think you’re being unduly unfair about the system. Yes it’s a garbage system but a lot of what you described is wisdoms that’s learned in hindsight. However when you consider that most of budgets are relatively static (eg salaries, cost of goods at a smaller scale, etc) it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the costs of running a apartment could be relatively static year on year. In fact the idea of dynamic pricing is a relatively new concept.
This doesn’t mean that the idea of budgets being relative to spend is a good one. Just that it’s easy to see how it was once perceived as a viable methodology.
There is a moral imperative to not waste a single cent of taxpayer monies, which means you as the guy writing the budget must ask what every single cent is being spent towards and must claw back (and subsequently refuse to budget) any pennies that are either unaccounted for or are unwarranted.
(Yes, tax dollars are wasted and deliberately so in reality. That is another subject of debate.)
Hence why the incentives are the way they are.
At the scale most governments work, reality is impossible to actually care about. It’s too much detail, and too confusing.
Instead, they allocate money, and then punish people when ‘the wrong things happen’.
Dealing with the reality is someone else’s problem, further down the hierarchy.
Also known as ‘shit rolls down hill’.
Yes, I agree that incentives can get strange, but that's the mindset to understand from executives.