I confess. A few years ago, I seriously thought of supporting a constitutional amendment to balance the nation's budget. It's true I had written in the past about the problems that such an amendment could create. But I thought that sometimes, in the lives of individuals and countries, you have to take an action that has serious drawbacks because the alternatives are worse. For instance, nobody likes the idea of imposing a curfew, but when a community is facing an unusual amount of violence and crime, most people will go along with one.
And so, as I watched the budget deficits growing bigger and bigger, I thought that maybe our country had lost the will power it had during its first 200 years; maybe we no longer elected politicians who were able to manage our country prudently. Perhaps a balanced budget amendment would be preferable to budget deficits and a skyrocketing national debt.
However, I concluded that a balanced budget amendment is not the answer. The budget is only an educated guess-- an estimate of how much the federal government will take in and spend over the next year. Even individuals with steady jobs and very regular patterns of expenditure sometimes find that they must spend more than they intended in a given year. In the life of a nation, this is even more true.
Government income and outlay are influenced by events no one can control or predict-- there can be unexpected expenditures or shortfalls because of natural disasters or bank failures or massive unemployment or because of the fallout from economic or political crises elsewhere in the world. But even writing a budget in an unremarkable year is not a science. And different economic theories can produce very different fiscal projections-- some of them wildly out of line with actual results. Remember how Ronald Reagan and his economists told us that if we cut taxes by billions of dollars, we would increase the money the government took in?
The reliability of budget projections is not the only issue. Passing a budget that complied with the rigid requirements of a balanced budget amendment would probably reduce Congress to "a procedural mess." That's the view of Carol Cox Wait, a conservative Republican, "deficit hawk" and president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, as presented in a recent Wall Street Journal article (February 24, 1994):
Whose economic assumptions would be used to forecast spending and receipts? What if they were wrong? Who would have standing to assert that they were wrong? What would happen if the budget gets out of balance? ... lf an amendment passed, those questions and a million more would insure that the federal budget ultimately lands in federal court, the answers to be provided by judges serving on the bench for life.
Now, if the deficit goes up and citizens don't like it, they can defeat the politicians they've elected. With a balanced budget amendment, we will get a system that is much less accountable because federal judges are appointed for life.
Some people say that, if ordinary folks can balance their budgets, the government can do the same. But most families -- and most businesses -- don't balance their budget in any given year, and there is no reason why they need to. Indeed, it may be better under certain circumstances not to balance it. Some years a family -- or the government -- must spend more in order to take care of needs that are unexpected or crucial. And often borrowing leads to economic advantages down the road. That's why parents go into debt to send their children to college. And many businesses become prosperous precisely because they have borrowed money to develop and market new products. A country also may have to incur short-term deficits in order to pursue important long- term goals or stimulate the economy. For 200 years, we have gotten along without a balanced budget requirement, and no other country puts its budget process into this kind of straitjacket.
If the arguments against a balanced budget amendment are so strong, how come the amendment has a good chance of getting through Congress? Probably because many members of Congress are facing tough re-election contests, and this is an issue that could give an opponent some cheap ammunition. Rather than take a chance of being called fiscally irresponsible, they may think it better to jump on the bandwagon, no matter what their reason and experience tell them.
A couple of years ago, I considered supporting a balanced budget amendment because I believed the political process no longer worked. Now we have a Congress and a President who have shown they are capable of cutting the deficit. And we have a five-year program that everyone admits will substantially reduce the deficit. The budget system our country has lived under for 200 years is back on track, and there is no reason to destroy it.