It’s budget season, when we get to hear the age-old liberal talking point about how budgets are “moral documents.” Everyone seems to be getting into the act — left-wing news sites, Bernie Sanders, and all the other usual suspects.

But budgets aren’t moral documents. Baseline budgeting just sets levels of spending for the good or bad decisions you’ve already made in the past. It is facile to argue that choices of specific levels of spending have an obvious moral character in a world where resources are finite.