Unlike that perennial Democrat favorite 'PAYGO' - a budget "constraint" that basically just means we pay as politicians go on bacchanalian spending binges - the balanced budget amendment that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) are proposing actually has teeth.
Of course, even a balanced budget amendment won't prevent every halfwit who manages to win a seat in Congress from trying to spend money that hasn't even been minted yet - but it should stop enough of them to put America back on a path to fiscal solvency.
Cross-posted.
Larwyn’s Linx: Leftism Is a Death Cult
13 hours ago
2 comments:
Bad idea. It's highly subject to the rule of unintended consequences -- promoting the election of more tax and spenders...
IHMO, there already is a GENERATIONALLY balanced budget statement in the Constitution -- "secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and our Posterity". It's just that politicians have chosen to ignore it by creating massive debts for future generations while buying votes for current generations. This isn't liberty for our posterity -- it's enslaving their future to pay for today's excesses.
Politicians will quickly work their way around this BBA, just as CA has done when they had a 2/3rds requirement to get budgets passed. Look where that has got them -- more broke than ever. What happened with the 2/3rds rule is MORE TAX AND SPENDERS WERE ELECTED because it was more (not less) difficult to hold them accountable.
I guess the Bob Bennet experience put the fear of God in old Orrin.
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