When budget allows
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The sun’ll come out tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun
Just thinkin’ about tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow ’til there’s none
Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya, tomorrow! —
You’re always a day away.
- — “Tomorrow”, from Annie (1977)
“When budget allows” is a hypothetical time in the future that, like Little Orphan Annie’s Tomorrow, is always there, dangling tantalisingly before us, as each day turns, getting no nearer. It is an indeterminate time of hope and aspiration: a sunlit dream-time in which there will be budget to hook up that feed, build out that API or invest in that brilliant piece of legaltech, for which there is no budget now.
Logicians will immediately sense a paradox. If its worth now fails to pass muster, its present value should it be delivered at an unknowable point in the henceforth is surely smaller still. The aperture constricts the further out we push. What kind of contortion in spacetime must we therefore crawl through, to reach that happy land?
Minds will hardly be put at rest by that glint in the middle manager’s eye. Presented with some supplicant’s exhortations, he will happily promise to sort it all out just as soon as budget allows. He will say this with confidence and without regret, maintaining eye contact the whole time. He can assure her, in good conscience, that all will, when the appointed time comes, be well. For then — the notional time in the future when budget allows — is literally unknowable.
It will never be known.
For if there is not enough interest to shell out for it now, will it be any closer to that threshold next month, next quarter, or by the time the next fiscal budgeting cycle rolls around?
Rhetorical question.