The Balanced Budget Amendment didn’t even get out of the starting gate this term. The House of Representatives rejected it with a vote of 261 for to 165 against, 23 votes short of the 2/3 majority necessary to send a proposed Constitutional Amendment to the Senate. And—though I would not have said so a few years ago—I’m glad it failed.
I actually do think that balancing the federal budget would be a good idea most of the time, but not all of the time. Without sufficient safeguards, a Constitutional requirement for a balanced budget would limit America’s ability to respond to genuine emergencies (think: World War II) or no-brainer opportunities (think: Louisiana Purchase) that could not be anticipated by any rational budget process.
There are, of course, emergency safeguards built into most contemporary versions of the balanced budget amendment. The resolution voted on yesterday—H.J. Res. 2—allows for deficit spending with approval of a 3/5 supermajority in both houses. If the United States is engaged in a military conflict, a deficit can be approved by a simply majority. So there are safeguards in the resolution that would allow reasonable people to react to situations where deficit spending is the only rational choice.
But we are not dealing with reasonable people.
This, unfortunately, is the logical conclusion to draw from last summer’s debt-ceiling debate. This was an excellent preview of how our current leaders would respond to a genuine fiscal emergency. On the day before America was set to default on its debt obligations for the first time since the Revolutionary War, 161 members of the House of Representatives voted against raising the debt ceiling. And even now, months after the debate, the “Supercommittee” that was formed by the debt compromise is on the brink of failing and throwing the nation back into the same crisis we faced in July and August.
And why has every attempt at a debt compromise failed? Because nearly every Republican currently in Congress has signed a pledge to never raise taxes, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason. Tea Party (and Utah) Senator Mike Lee even argues in his (genuinely awful) book The Freedom Agenda, that any balanced budget amendment should require a Congressional Supermajority to increase taxes (72)—a provision that found its way into an earlier version of the rejected amendment. And this, ultimately, is why Americans should not trust the current Congress with a balanced budget amendment. They have made it abundantly clear that goal of balancing the budget is less important than the goal of reducing taxes.
No quickie-mart manager would seriously set out to balance a budget by declaring a moratorium on any increase in revenue, much less a pledge to reduce revenues by any means possible. The Chair of the House Budget Committee, on the other hand, seriously proposed a budget that would try to balance the budget with nearly 2 trillion dollars in tax cuts. Such uncritical belief in the power of tax cuts, as I have argued before, goes well beyond rational economic theory and becomes a belief in magic.
Really balancing the budget will require real pain and real sacrifice on the part of all Americans—those who pay taxes and those who receive entitlements. Those who believe that they can pull it off one hand tied behind their backs are deluded. Let’s not change the Constitution to make their delusions permanent.
