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.
Fans of the movie Zombieland might understand the post title right away. In the movie the lead protagonist, "Columbus" has a set of rules he always follows which he believes are the only reason he is still alive after the world is turned into Zombieland by a mutant strain of Mad Cow disease that turns almost everyone into crazed, flesh eating zombies.
There are plenty of towns like mine trying to figure out where they can cut costs. But every conversation seems to end at cutting education or safety services. While I find it hard to believe that there is nothing else in a budget you can trim, I think I have come up with a reasonable compromise (if not just for the sake of our own rhetorical amusement) that can cut at least a little bit of money from the budget without affecting staffing or resources.
For quite some time more than a few of us out here in the private sector have been paying into our own retirement plans–if we can–for years. After the Housing bubble burst many of us began reducing the amount we contributed as a lousy economy consumed opportunities, wage growth and jobs–our neighbors jobs or even our own.