I’ve never understood the Republican-conservative, Libertarian, Right-Wing-in General, love affair with the idea of a balanced budget amendment. And it is not just my fear of letting the same modern Americans who think doing away with the electoral college is a good idea have a whack at the US Constitution. It’s actually much simpler than that. A balance has two sides, and all things being equal, the side paying will get screwed.
And yes, I understand that almost every state has to balance it’s budget. Even New Hampshire–despite what former governor (and dopey US Senator) Jeanne Shaheen thinks–must do this by law. But this is no guarantee that a government will not spend more than it takes in. The same government that decides what it spends will decide what it takes in. And unless you are a Granite Stater with a severe case of ADD, or just a very short memory, you may recall that balancing the budget need not have a single thing to do with austerity, control, or concern for the people who pay for government. It merely requires you to find revenues to equal your spending.
For a quick review of how bad that scenario is, lets grab Simon and Mr. Peabody and jump into our way-back machine to the halcyon days after the 2006 elections when Democrats had complete control of the New Hampshire government for four years. " Balanced Budget" meant 100’s of new taxes and fees, many of them forced through at the last possible minute. There were taxes that were enacted without a single hearing (in violation of other portions of New Hampshire law). Land would be sold to raise revenue without anyone knowing what land or who might buy it, for how much, or if we could even sell it. There was one time money, imagined cost shifting, raiding of dedicated funds, transfers from future years, and all manner of dark accounting magic used to create the illusion of a ‘balanced’ budget," perched in a Rube Goldbergian maze, upon a pedestal, in a pentagram, guarded by straw men arranging goat entrails, scrying into alternate fiscal dimensions to hold off the demons of structural deficits yet to be. To put a finer point on it, revenues were imagined to cover desired spending, without the revenue every actually being there to begin with, and when it failed to appear, someone had to pay for it to balance the budget. That or cut programs and spending. Typically, it is not the latter.
So having witnessed this abuse in one of the most politically active states, under some of the most withering scrutiny, with the benefit of the third largest representative body in the world, makes me wonder why anyone who lived through it would even suggest that things would be just ducky if we let distant, professional legislators, have a whack at it along the shores of the Potomac?
Sounds scary. But could it get worse? Of course it could.
As shockingly absurd as the political rights sudden trust in congress might be, with a balanced budget amendment in hand, their sudden and enormous blind spot regarding the nature of amendments in general, takes us off a cliff faster than Obama driving the Hopey Changey bus into the Grand Canyon
Just picture it. A constitutional amendment. Who has, or more to the point ends up with oversight on disputes regarding constitutional amendments? Judges? Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. That’s right, that trustworthy lot of unelected lawyers in long black robes will get to decide the outcome of any number of lawsuits–numbering in the thousands–regarding the relationship between governments obligations and the nature of a balanced budget.
You might as well just hand the checkbook to the circuit courts and the Supreme’s because that is exactly where the budget, and spending, will end up. Tim Gordon over at American Thinker recently galvanized this concern for me when I read his article, Why Conservatives should Bork the Balanced Budget Amendment.
With the courts in play the entire point of a budget and electing officials to guard you against federal fiscal abuse, evaporates in a puff of judicial opinion. The solution to any unbalanced federal budget is quite simple to resolve…particularity since we don’t even bother writing federal budgets anymore. (and don’t we have a law that requires that?). You have to raise revenue to cover the spending. What, you think they’ll cut programs?
Bwahahahahaha!
Which brings me back to the single biggest problem I have with a balanced budget requirement, and my original point. You can balance a budget by raising taxes. If the government has spent the money, then you have to raise taxes. Would having a judge tell you to do it make it better or worse?
So I ask you, balanced budget amendment supporters–of the class of persons least likely to trust the government I might add–would you like to give the government an excuse to raise taxes? Would you like the courts to have virtually unlimited power to decide how much spending is proper, and who or how it should be paid, with the states being victimized by their own judiciary in the process?
My suggestion? You should run screaming from the Balanced budget amendment, right after you stab it in the heart, burn it, and bury it in an unmarked grave. And then promise never to speak of it again.
Then ask yourself if you meant to implement legislation for some kind of federal tax and spending cap instead, and were thinking that for now at least, we should leave the Constitution alone–except perhaps to try and enforce the one we have before we go and screw it up some more.
