I've wrestled with that, and perhaps my academic colleague might have something to add, but my impression is that when you separate the capital budget from the operating budget, you open avenues for fudging. What is capital and what isn't capital is a debatable notion.
I know that lawyer friends of mine who deal with the selling or purchasing of businesses always prefer the cash accounts to the accrual accounts because they figure they're getting a truer picture of a business. It's not that I don't trust public servants or politicians, but I do feel that keeping away from capital budgets, as something totally different from operating budgets, opens the room for more fiddling than I would like to see. We did it in the past, and I was not comfortable with what we did then.