Senator Hatch launches his campaign to put America’s fiscal house in order by passing the Balanced Budget amendment; a constitutional amendment that would force the congress and the president to balance the national budget each year.
The disagreement is over the solutions — on what spending to cut; what taxes to raise (basically none ever, according to Boozman); whether or not to enact a balanced budget amendment (Boozman says yes; Pryor no); and on what policies would promote the kind of economic growth that would make this a little easier.
Over the next few days I want to take a closer look a Cato Policy Report from July/August 1996 called “Seven Reforms to Balance the Budget” by Stephen Moore. Stephen Moore was the Cato Institute’s director of fiscal policy studies, and afterwards, a Cato senior fellow. This article is based on testimony he delivered before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight on March 27, 1996. Moore commented:
Deficit spending is an unconscionable form of fiscal child abuse. There are hundreds of groups in Washington that pretend to speak for the interests of children. But who in Washington, among the thousands of powerful special-interest lobbyists and self-proclaimed do-gooders, speaks for the children who are going to have to pay off our irresponsible debts? The single most pro-child policy that any of us can pursue in Washington today is to reduce the crushing burden of debt our government is now preparing to place on the next generation’s backs.
I sincerely wish that we did not need a constitutional amendment to cure Washington’s addiction to red ink. Unfortunately, the destruction of our nation’s once firmly held moral rule against deficit spending–what James Buchanan called “the collapse of the constitutional consensus”–requires us to amend our Constitution and command Congress to do what it used to feel honor bound to do–balance the budget.
Tax-and-spend opponents of a balanced-budget amendment argue that a constitutional requirement is just “a gimmick.” No one really believes that. If the amendment were a gimmick, Congress would have approved it long ago. Defense contractors, corporate lobbyists, federal workers, teachers’ unions, the welfare industry, and other powerful special-interest groups ferociously attack the amendment, not because they think it won’t work, but because they shudder at the thought that it will. What frightens the predator economy in Washington is that gift-bearing politicians may have the federal credit card taken away from them.
The U.S. House of Representatives last year wisely approved a balanced-budget amendment, but it was defeated in the Senate. The matter is now out of your hands. The real issue is, What can be done in the meantime to make the budget process work better and to end deficit spending?
Last year the House passed a courageous budget, crafted by Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, that promised a balanced budget by 2002. But one thing is a virtual certainty: no matter how sincere your intentions of balancing the budget, the deficit will not be eliminated by 2002 unless new budget enforcement rules are implemented to ensure that this admirable, though minimal, goal is honored.
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Jan 25, 2010
Labor Department numbers show that the Obama Administrations $787 billion stimulus was a flop. Instead of holding the unemployment rate at 8 percent or below, the jobless rate soared to 10 percent. Now there is discussion of second so-called stimulus, which politicians are calling a jobs bill. But making government bigger, this CF&P Foundation video explains, is a recipe for long-run stagnation and lower living standards, regardless of what the policy is named. www.freedomandprosperity.org
It has been 150 years since the beginning of the Civil War that started in April of 1861 at Ft Sumter.
| The Grand Review of the Army down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C |
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