The government shutdown of this past October may be in the past, but the specter of our federal budget remains. Budget talks are currently underway and approaching the Dec. 13 deadline set for the bill they hope to produce. Although our government is yet again spending money, we do not have a federal budget.

For years now our government has been running on what are called “continuing resolutions” as opposed to actual, formal budgets. The main difference between the two is that a continuing resolution, as its name might imply, essentially continues the spending levels authorized by previous budgets.

Since we have apparently been getting on just fine these last few years, writing and passing a formal budget might seem like an unnecessary step in our governing process. If we can agree on how much our government is going to spend without a budget, what purposes could a budget serve?

As it turns out, some very useful ones.

First and foremost, a budget, as opposed to a continuing resolution, shows that our governing officials are accepting the past as past and are looking toward the future. Any time various people and groups are responsible for detailing the ways in which collective money is spent, there are going to be issues.

This has certainly been true of our federal budget. With deficit hawks keeping an ever-watchful eye on our level of debt, select corporate tax loopholes remaining open despite wide unpopularity, automatic cuts in defense appropriations scheduled and a host of other spending problems, there is no shortage of sides to the U.S. budget talks.

Even in the face of so many warring factions, the fact remains that plans need to be in place for how our money will be appropriated. When the different sides cannot come to an agreement on what those plans should look like, an easy fix is to put the problem off and just say that whatever worked before will work again.

Such is the logic behind a continuing resolution, but even with modifications, a resolution to keep current spending levels is akin to living in the past. The world is changing every minute and our federal budget must reflect that. By passing a formal budget, our government can show that not only can we potentially bring ourselves to agree on a plan for the future, but that such a plan is actually written.

Beyond acting as a symbol of how our elected officials can do what they are legally required to do, a budget allows the various government agencies and private industries that it will affect to know what will be happening. Some continuing resolutions may last longer than others, but in general their timeframe is on the order of months.

Businesses and agencies today are planning years in advance and would dramatically benefit from having a firmer guarantee that our government will be spending in the amounts and places they think it will.

Aside from these reasons, a federal budget is sorely needed to prevent the debacles that have become our spending negotiations, which resemble games of chicken with horrifyingly destructive effects.

Some attempts to make last October’s government shutdown appear to have been about the budget through a small amount of discretionary spending that would be used to implement portions of the Affordable Care Act (the majority of which was mandatory spending). However, it can be safely said that our last shutdown was due to a policy dispute that was not a major budget issue.

If that is the direction budget negotiations have taken, a change must be made. Instead of accepting the bleak prospect that we are simply not being able to agree on a comprehensive budget again, we as a nation should ask that our legislators continue working toward agreements.

In this case, that means asking them to authorize a real budget, even if it does not have everything they wanted or contains something they did not want. After all, making those tough compromises is exactly the job our representatives and senators were elected to do.