Professor Michael McMahon:

Our discussion in September highlighted this for me. Around the room there were many different views on what should be core and non-core. Let us ignore taking the stuff out of it completely, which we think is a real error.If you have some things that we think should be core, then some should be non-core. How we should define between them? I think you can reasonably argue back and forth. If you pick one of them and stick with it, then that can be consistently year by year and we can apply the principles. I am not saying you could do it necessarily with 100% accuracy because there would be little things here and there that you would have to make a decision on. What you certainly cannot get involved in is the gimmickry where from year to year we start shifting things in and out and what counts and what does not. I think that some of the budgeting would be much easier and clearer if we simply did it without core versus non-core and then we made arguments for why. If we think there is a sustainable level of spending and we go above that for some reason, you then put the case for why it is acceptable and sensible to violate it. If you keep doing it year after year then the question will be what revenue is going to be generated to now pay for this because it is not a one year deviation but a multi-year deviation in the same way other types of spending are expected to be paid for.