One of Buchanan's most important and influential books. The radical idea he conceived was that: our reliance on public debt has amassed a sort of orthodoxy that is commonly -- and needlessly -- assumed by taxpayers, by politicians, and by economists themselves. Buchanan dismisses the nearly universal belief (which continues to this day) that the burden of debt is borne by the current generation, and he argues persuasively that public debt is shouldered in large part by generations still to come. Written in 1958, this book represents Buchanan's first published monograph, and its publication met with much controversy, confusion, and speculation in the economic community. But the book also added to Buchanan's rising stature in the early part of his career as a brilliant and original thinker. The arguments Buchanan lays out in this book had a considerable impact on much of his later work. Buchanan's object here is to establish a set of analytical claims about debt incidence. Current anxieties over implicit Social Security debt are clear indications of the rightness of Buchanan's then-revolutionary theory.

Data processing can be defined as treating or preparing data by some particular method to obtain desired facts and to produce reports. Business data processing is much broader than computing alone and the requisite equipment for it involves the people, procedures, and communication network to cover the gamut from data origination to report utilization. Accounting instruction in data processing should deal with existing problems rather than futuristic problems and rely upon an evolutionary approach. The instructional objectives of a course in business data processing are to define and delineate the area; to show what is possible; to give an awareness of the problems involved; to describe the experience of others in systems analysis, design and installation and to develop skills in computer programming including the use of programs prepared by others, if well understood. The committee recommends that accounting departments introduce courses dealing with business data processing and new equipment developments.