Budgets may look like tables of numbers, but they are also stories about priorities, constraints, and who pays. This brief examines more than 500 fiscal communications from G7 finance ministries from 2000 and 2024, using text analysis, and finds that governments send fiscal signals through three channels: a technical budget document for experts, a political speech for the public, and a press release for the media. Some differentiation is expected because each format serves a different audience. The more important finding is that this division of labor is systematic. The same fiscal package becomes an accounting record in the budget document, a political narrative in the speech, and a headline signal in the press release. This structure is useful, but it can also pull the fiscal story away from the fiscal arithmetic. […]