Balanced Budget Amendment

My "Fiscal Fitness" column from today's Roll Call explains why a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution will create fiscal speakeasies, budget bathtub gin, and bootleg spending. And we'll probably be doing the budget process Charleston too.

Under a BBA, the Bathtub Budget Gin Would Flow

By Stan Collender
Roll Call Contributing Writer
Oct. 18, 2011, Midnight

If you watched any one of the three episodes of “Prohibition,” Ken Burns’ excellent PBS series about the attempt in the early part of the 20th century to ban alcoholic consumption in the United States, it’s impossible not to see the strong parallels between that effort and the movement to add a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The most obvious similarity is that Prohibition was and the BBA is an effort to enact a constitutional amendment. But there’s so much more that the comparison is almost eerie.

Some of us are old enough to have grown up watching The Lone Ranger. When Tonto handed The Lone Ranger the silver bullet, you knew he would shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand with one shot, and all would end happily. Lately, Congress has been awash with balanced budget amendments (BBAs) to the Constitution. In my opinion, there are no silver bullets when it comes to balancing the federal budget.

In his usual eloquent style, Bruce earlier this week provided his take on the so-called balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.   My take is that the proposed amendment is incredibly misnamed because it's anything but balanced.  As I explained in my column from today's Roll Call, the amendment the House will consider at some point (It's already been delayed from this week to next) is a complete fraud.

    I heartily agree with Bruce Bartlett's scathing description of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's proposal for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution: it's phony, simplistic, ill-informed and cynical.

    But my wife stopped me cold this morning with this question:  "Ed, what if you were a Republican politician right now, running against a Democrat?  What else would you come up with?"

    My short answer: I got nothing. 

     Obviously, there are plausible conservative ideas about how to reduce the budget deficit, deal with entitlements, reform health care or regulate financial services.  

The Daily Caller, the new Huffington-esque website fronted by Tucker Carlson, today includes a piece by Minnesota Governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty that shows he's not ready for prime time when it comes to the federal budget.

Pawlenty complains about federal spending and then says that federal cuts to Medicaid will make the budget problems in states like his worse.  Presumably that means that he doesn't want Medicaid to be cut.

Pawlenty complains about federal spending without referencing any of the other federal dollars his own state gets.  This includes the emergency funds Washington provided and he accepted with open arms when the I-35W bridge collapsed in 2007.

He complains about federal spending being too high last year but then endorses a  amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow a balanced budget amendment to be suspended in times of national emergency...like the recession that existed last year.