Bruce Bartlett wrote in The Fiscal Times, The Real Reason the GOP Wants a Balanced Budget Amendment. He says it's just political theater.
"Thus a big problem for proponents of a balanced budget amendment has always been how to enforce it. Lacking de facto enforcement from the rating agencies, there would have to be some mechanism whereby the courts could intervene to block spending or force tax increases for a balanced budget requirement to be operational and not just an expression of sentiment.
Not only is it a really bad idea to give unelected judges such power, it is not really practical. For example, until the last day of a fiscal year, it would be impossible to say, as a matter of law, that the balanced budget requirement had been violated. At that point, spending would have already occurred, and it’s not really feasible to tell people to send back some of their Social Security checks because the budget was unbalanced. And who is to say what spending was the amount that went above revenues and what wasn’t?"
"Another problem is that Congress cannot know what GDP will be in the coming fiscal year and it must necessarily pass its appropriations bills before the fiscal year begins. This means, as a practical matter, that Congress must base its spending on forecasts of GDP, which are often wrong and sometimes by large magnitudes. And of course it is impossible to control spending on entitlements or interest on the debt on an annual basis."
and his conclusion: "If Republicans were really serious about putting a balanced budget amendment into the Constitution they would not have written an entirely new one that is radically and conceptually different from those debated in the past, with new language that constitutional scholars have not even begun to analyze. Republicans would have held weeks of hearings with such experts and planned many more weeks of floor debate. GOP think tanks would have been urged to hold conferences and publish studies of the proposed amendment. None of this was done, of course, leaving the inescapable conclusion that this is nothing but a political ploy designed solely to appeal to the GOP’s Tea Party wing. "
I have a different view. I think the Tea Party is thinking of it as they do everything else, at a headline level without understanding the details. A balanced budget sounds good and debt is bad so a balanced budget amendment should be good and would help us limit our debt. I suspect someone like Cantor or a staffer included the 18 percent of economic output part and from what I see from a quick search online people are furious thinking that means it's not really balanced. The lunatics are running the asylum.
6 comments:
Great post, Howard. I'm intrigued by the reality of defining and enforcing "balanced." It's a great point that the implementation is almost impossible. On the other hand, there is large segment of the population who voted for people partly on a "balance"-the-budget platform. The enforcement parts were not as critical as the idea that our income and outcome were out of whack, and more taxes wasn't the answer.
I don't think it's right to expect the mass of population to understand how to accomplish this. On the other hand, our politicians should be able to understand this, and explain it to the people. They ought to be able to find ways to accomplish the will of the people, and explain the consequences.
We could say that people are stupid, and so politicians (who know better) should do what they want, regardless of the will of the people. I'd rather see the politicians lead by coming up with ideas, explaining them and driving the will of the people in ways that can be accomplished. JFK and NASA come to mind.
I'd like to see that the Rs and Ds could make a case and listen better to the people. Neither side seems inherently right, despite insistence of vast swaths of people on each side that the other side is stupid. I suspect the "right" answer is a balance, and that we have a oddly un-damped system.
Obama won in part because people wanted to see more overt government action to solve the economic problems - driving more spending. The people thought we overspent, and elected tea party candidates to compensate - driving a fight on debt limits. If that's overdone, the people will speak again, I'm sure.
I'd love it if politicians and journalists explained things to the people but that doesn't seem to happen at all. They seem much more effective at sound bites and making things up. I post plenty on the absurdity of 24 cable news never having time to cover a difficult issue in any depth. Fox News and Rush and GOP politicians makes up stuff and repeats it until people thinks it's true. Dems politicians can't explain anything to anyone. Obama did a great job with his race speech during the campaign but hasn't done the equivalent since and I wish he would. The health care summit he hosted demonstrated that he could have on that issue but he didn't do in a way accessible to people the way a speech would have.
While I'd call some on the right stupid (and I have no sympathy for creationists or birthers) I know some are just misinformed and not everyone has time to sort through all the muck, this isn't easy.
I think most Dems want the budget balanced and aren't the crazy spenders that the right paints us out to be (Obama wanted a "blank check"). Clinton balanced the budget and generated a surplus that was paying down the debt. Now it wasn't all him, he had the advantage of a good economy. Bush's problems were mostly his own making.
Rolling back the Bush tax cuts would go a long way to bringing things into balance. I think may favorite way to fix social security (which isn't that broken) is to raise the cap on what income is subject to social security taxes (to balance the growing income inequity). It's not a large raise that would stabilize it. We need to cut defense spending, there's no need for us to spend more than all other industrial nations combined on defense. Medicare is the real long term problem and the best way to fix it is to bring down health care costs which are higher in the US than anywhere else. But no Obamacare is socialism even though it's an idea from the Heritage Foundation. Honestly I think curing or preventing diabetes is the best thing we can do to fix the long term budget problems (fixing the farm bill might do it).
But all of that is unimportant until we create more jobs. Krugman had a post where he decried centrists. There's nothing that says the center solution is the most correct one and he'd rather do the correct one. In this case, austerity isn't it (it's failing in Britain), it's spending (the reason WWII got us out of the depression). It's also why a balanced budget amendment is wrong, it doesn't give the government the flexibility to adjust the economy when it needs to. The government is not a household and it shouldn't be.
But the right has so effectively dominated the conversation that we can't even talk about it. Somehow they convinced people that government spending caused the recession instead of an unregulated banking sector placing crazy leveraged bets on an industry in a bubble. And now the right is protecting the banks from Elizabeth Warren.
Are people stupid for believing this propaganda? I'm not sure, but they are wrong. But I don't know how you have a conversation with people who think Obama is muslim foreigner or who think climate change science is a vast liberal conspiracy. And when the right all gets their news from FNC and Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity push all this crap until it's true, I get pretty despondent.
I agree that Obama's race speech was a gem. I was very excited that he might be able to bring the same to the rest of Washington. He ran on his ability to bring the two sides together. I don't think it's his fault, but we are farther apart than ever.
For some reason, we've stopped being able to discuss issues as if they actually have two sides, with difficult trade-offs on either side. I'm frustrated with people's inability to understand other points of view.
And you are right that the press isn't helping.
Ken
There are two things I've posted before that I'm thinking more and more are the root causes. The first is the obvious division and partisanship of news media, particularly fox. I don't buy that news had a strong media bias before, but fox is clearly not balanced. MSNBC is making a mistake by being the fox of the left (though they don't go nearly as far). I like PBS news hour and various things I point to here and a few other things (NPR, Frontline, etc.)
The second I heard about a few months ago and has to do with Congress directly. Reps spend so much time fundraising, and particularly this house does 1 week on and 2 off (or the reverse) that they don't get an apt in town, many live in their office. Also their families stay home. So they don't run into each other in the market or at school or on weekends, so they don't get to know each other. Apparently they're good to know other reps from the same state, they don't know even all in their party let alone anyone in the other party. It's easy to insult someone you don't know. It's hard to negotiate with someone you've never met.
I really like the second point. Post more on that.
As for the first point, I lean more right than you, and from my perspective, the media is strongly left leaning, and was that way long before Fox. (I agree Fox is too right leaning. Perhaps "balancing" is a better word.)
I'm bad at specific examples, but if I hear/remember them, I'll let you know. But one general example is an emphasis on hard luck stories, where we all should get upset and make sure so-and-so gets help from some program. Those kind of stories get ratings, so it may be inherent. You seldom see a news story about local business men that cut costs, and were able to hire more sales staff to increase profit. Those things are bad, we learn: business men, cutting costs, increased profit.
Regarding "You seldom see a news story about local business men that cut costs, and were able to hire more sales staff to increase profit." I note that most times, when businesses cut costs, that usually means lays off people, not hires more. ;)
I look forward to examples. I note that most reports I see on accuracy in the media, all list Fox listeners as the doing the worst on political knowledge tests. As Krugman often says, "the facts have a liberal bias".
Still if you haven't tried PBS News Hour, I recommend it and am curious as to your take on it.
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