Editorial
EDITORIALS Just say no Hirst the good news. Earlier this month the Republican leadership in Congress postponed bringing the Balanced-Budget Amendment to a vote in the Senate. The proposed...
...Moreover, there is a broad and disturbing political agen-da behind the siren call of the Balanced-Budget Amendment...
...The states routinely resort to the flim-siest bookkeeping schemes to balance their books, and in Congress both parties have indulged in similar sleight-of-hand...
...Yet the amendment makes the nation's best chance of overcoming economic or political calamity (think of the Great Depression and World War II) hostage to a minority...
...The Balanced-Budget Amendment threatens to unbalance the arrangement of countervailing powers at the heart of our democracy...
...Excessive deficits can spell economic trouble...
...It is a radical, not a conservative or a responsible proposal, and Americans should shun it...
...Arguably it is just as essential as a mechanism for more equitably distributing the benefits of prosperity...
...The procedures of majority rule are messy and certainly no guarantor of the truth, but historically they have proven a bulwark against fragmentation and tyranny...
...Perhaps most worrisome, the Balanced-Budget Amend-ment effectively negates majority rule by placing the power of the purse in the hands of a minority: the mere two-fifths in either the House or Senate needed to defeat any future deficit spending...
...In the aftermath of the first Gingrich Congress, voters learned just how devastating to middle-class entitlements and domestic spending programs balancing the federal budget could be...
...As a consequence, the burden of spending cuts has unjustly fallen on the poor...
...For the time being, the fate of the amendment evidently rests in the untested hands of four newly elected Democratic senators, all of whom have been carefully balancing their own political ledgers by hedging their bets between the proposal's considerable polit-ical appeal (polls show voters favor it by large margins) and its almost certain dire consequences and practical unworkability...
...With a little po-litical courage and vision, spending for Social Security, Medicare, and the Defense Department can be controlled...
...A balanced-budget amendment will mean the federal government's further abandonment of the poor and perhaps the end of federal investment for educa-tion, infrastructure, and public health and safety...
...Tinkering with the Constitution is entirely unwarranted...
...But as the last four years of steady deficit reduction show, economic growth and fis-cal discipline can manage the federal debt...
...As the neoconservative Gertrude Himmelfarb has written (Commentary, February), "the 'devolution' of relief to the states is not merely a considerable move toward federalism...
...However, states do borrow for capital expenditures such as building roads and schools, something the constitutional amendment would not allow the fed-eral government to do...
...Moreover, increased federal spending for public re-lief and to spur the economy is essential during times of economic distress or national emergency...
...but] a considerable step toward the abolition of relief as an entitlement...
...But deficits are best understood when mea-sured in relation to the size of the whole economy...
...The amendment stipulates that a three-fifths majority in Congress would be required to suspend the balanced-budget requirement...
...The proposed amendment requires that the feder-al budget be balanced by the year 2002, or two years after the amend-ment has been ratified by the states, and would make it illegal for the government to spend more than it receives in revenues...
...It is essentially the same amendment passed by the House in 1995 but defeated by one vote (Mark Hatfield, R-Oreg...
...Fiscal responsibility remains a resonant issue with the American elec-torate, whose own state governments are generally required to balance their bud-gets...
...Proponents of the amendment argue that its severe restrictions are a sure check on fiscal irresponsi-bility...
...The Republicans shelved the amendment because they did not have the su-permajority (sixty votes in the Senate) needed for its passage...
...By some measures, 90 percent of the recent reductions in federal spending has come at the expense of the least well-off...
...The rage for balanced budgets, in other words, is really a war on the idea of government's re-sponsibility for the common good, and especially for the needy-a war being waged by fiscal strangulation...
...Now for the bad news: the amendment effort is far from dead...
...And finally, if the amendment is implemented the ambi-guities surrounding government accounting practices and even the meaning of words such as "revenues" would in-evitably be contested in the courts, thus further judicializ-ing our politics...
...Republicans, no less than Democrats, were quick to protect powerful special interests and pop-ular federal programs in their home districts...
...That is doubtful...
...Yes, without further cuts in middle-class entitlements larg-er deficits loom in the near future as the baby-boom gener-ation reaches retirement age (2010...
...Currently, the annual federal deficit is a very low 1.5 percent of GDP, and has fallen from $290 billion in 1992 to $107 billion in 1996...
...How Americans go about financing the necessary tasks of government at all lev-els is a complicated question with no one right answer...
...Happily, Bob Dole's outspoken endorsement of the amendment fell largely on deaf ears in the 1996 presidential election...
...Balancing the federal budget was, of course, the rallying cry of the 1994 "revolution" that swept the Republicans to majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years...
Vol. 124 • February 1997 • No. 4
