4.5 Budget as a Tool of Social Welfare and Economic Justice

The thesis (the syllabus's own claim — argue it): the budget is not an accounting document but the state's chief instrument of distributive justice — Jurisprudence Unit 5.2's distributive justice made fiscal:1. The revenue side's equity: progressive income taxation (ability to pay); property and capital taxation (the wealth-base correction); the regressive-indirect offset (VAT's compensation through transfers — the design question);2. The expenditure side's justice: the social protection floor (the old-age, single-women's, disability and child allowances — universal transfers as the social-democratic floor — POTH 5.3's ledger); free basic health and education (the human-capital equalisers); targeted programmes (the poverty-focused projects — with the targeting-vs-universality debate);3. The federal equity instrument: the equalisation grants — the formula-based transfers narrowing the provinces' and locals' fiscal gaps (the horizontal equity of federalism — ECO-I 5.5's machinery, here in theory);4. The budgetary governance that makes it real: the Appropriation Act's discipline (no expenditure without parliamentary sanction — the legal spine); gender-responsivebudgeting (the Nepali innovation: the budget classification tracking gender-relevant allocations — introduced in the mid-2000s, an exam-worthy Nepali export); the medium-term framework and the fiscal rules (the deficit-and-debt anchors);5. The honest limits: the implementation gap (the capital underspend), the leakage layer, the dependency structure (the deficit financed future), and the regressive-in-practice risk of an indirect-heavy mix — the gap between the budget as justice instrument and…