Once again "budget day caused a huge hoo hah in Ottawa that left the rest of the country cold. But once again it did not produce a budget.

Oh, it produced a big document. And Economic Action Plan 2013 is a reasonable title for 442-page brick Finance Minister and mortgage rate commissar Jim Flaherty gave us on Thursday, as full of economic planning as of self-congratulation. But, for instance, the most important responsibility of a national government is defence. Yet nowhere in this gooey document are we told what the government plans to spend on defence next year.

Instead we get endless verbiage about how military spending creates jobs. Which is sad but not surprising. Eight days before this vaguely budget-like object thudded onto journalists' desks, we got a depressing insight into how Ottawa sees such things from former finance department associate deputy minister and TD Bank Chief Economist Don Drummond. Budgets, he wrote in the Globe and Mail, "are typically viewed as vehicles for announcing new initiatives and setting out economic and fiscal prospects."

No they're not. Outside the Ottawa fishbowl budgets are typically viewed as statements of money coming in and money going out. Even the British budget, modestly titled Budget 2013 and just 112 pages, provides pie charts right in the executive summary, on page 6, that break down "government receipts" and "government spending" by category, including defence.

Not Pompous Document Thing 2013. Indeed, to see how far it is from being a budget, imagine your partner frowning at the bank account then saying ominously, "Honey, I need you to do us a budget." So you sit down with your accounting software, shoebox of receipts or whatever embarrassing thing you normally wave at your accountant or the Canada Revenue Agency come tax time and ... what?

Duh. You list every significant spending category in one column, every significant income source in another, add them up and compare totals. After briefly considering dashing out for lottery tickets or shooting at a rabbit and hitting oil instead, you tackle the spending side, figuring out what you really need as opposed to just want, what you can control and what you can't.

Unless you like sleeping on the couch, outside, you definitely don't then produce a glossy, pretentiously titled document that spends hundreds of pages listing shiny new baubles you've bought (like "$8 million to help the restoration and revitalization of Massey Hall" or "record investments in sport").

There are several important reasons why the federal government doesn't produce real budgets. First is smugness. Second is an unshakable conviction that these documents are tools of central planning not accountability. The third is that if they were real budgets they would be embarrassing.

Honest analysis of the long-term cost of social programs for an aging population would expose the irresponsible political expediency of repeated promises not to cut "transfers to persons, including those for seniors, children and the unemployed, or transfers to other levels of government in support of health care and social services." And if they talked frankly about how lousy their short-term financial management has been you'd be angry.

For instance, Economic Action Plan 2013 has lavish colour charts predicting a return to balanced budgets by 2015 and showing the wonderful savings initiatives making this grand thing happen. OK, then, why did last year's budget say deficits from 2011-12 through 2014-15 would be $24.9, $21.1, $10.2 and $1.3 billion and now they're going to be $26.2, $25.9, $18.7 and $6.6 billion, a total increase in red ink of $19.9 billion? To follow this non-admission with a boast of reducing bureaucratic travel costs through electronic conferencing would be laughable if it weren't tragic.

Central planning of the Canadian economy is not going well. It never does, even if the planners give themselves an A++ for their work. In any case what citizens need isn't the latest Pravda feature on the glorious Five-Year Plan.

They need a clear, honest statement of where the government plans to spend public money, where it hopes to get it and what it will do if things are even worse than they seem. In short, an actual budget on budget day.