Balanced-budget amendment always stupid
Abalanced-budget amendment is pretty much always a stupid idea. But you know when it’s stupidest?
When you’ve just blown a multitrillion-dollar hole in the deficit, and also, umm, don’t even really plan to pass a budget.
House Republicans voted Thursday to make deficits unconstitutional. There is no universe in which this would be good policy. Were it to ever actually become a part of the Constitution (spoiler alert: It won’t, and not only because the House measure fell short of the two-thirds vote needed to advance), it would be catastrophic for our economy.
Sometimes the government needs to spend more money than it receives in a given year to respond to a crisis, such as war, natural disaster or recession. In the case of recession, for instance, federal tax revenue auto- matically falls as the economy shrinks and businesses and individuals earn less. Under a balanced-budget requirement, this situation would require Congress to slash federal spending, raise taxes or both.
Which is exactly the opposite of what economists prescribe during a recession, when you want the government to plug the hole left by a contracting private sector.
Had a balanced-budget amendment been in effect in fiscal 2012, as the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession, for example, it would have nearly doubled the unemployment rate, the research firm Macroeconomic Advisers forecast at the time.
Nonetheless, good economy or bad, Republicans claim to want fiscal discipline.
Every time they’ve had the opportunity to go on a fiscal diet, they’ve pigged out instead.
In December, at a time when a reasonably strong economy actually could absorb some fiscal belt-tightening, Republicans passed massive, deficit-financed tax cuts. Then, come 2018, they enacted major spending increases. The cost of this fiscal gluttony, according to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, is enormous.
Laws passed since June 2017 alone are expected to add $2.7 trillion to deficits over the next decade, the CBO says. These legislative changes, plus rising interest costs, mean our federal debt will nearly overtake the size of the entire economy by 2028.
These projections, by the way, are all probably too optimistic. That’s because Congress’s official scorekeepers used two relatively favorable assumptions.
First, the CBO was required to assume that Congress will stick to the laws on the books, which are full of gimmicks to make the Republican agenda look cheaper than it is. For instance, the CBO assumed that the GOP’s individual-side tax cuts will expire in 2025, as existing law says, even though Congress will almost certainly extend them.
Second, the CBO assumed that the economy will remain relatively strong for the entirety of the next decade. Which also seems unlikely, given that we’re already far into one of the longest expansions on record.
All of which is to say that it’s astonishingly hypocritical for Republicans to champion a balanced-budget amendment. Not that anyone actually expects this effort to succeed; attempts at similar amendments at the federal level have always failed.
Even so, there’s another reason this fiscal pageantry is especially galling. Congress historically can’t even get its act together to pass a budget, any budget at all, let alone a deficit-free one.
In literally every year over the past two decades, lawmakers have failed to pass a full spending package before the next fiscal year begins. Instead, they’ve kept the government running for weeks or months with stopgap spending bills and duct tape, with the occasional shutdown. And lately they’ve become even more reliant on stopgaps.
This year looks no different: The statutory deadline for passing the rough outlines of a budget for fiscal 2019 -- called a budget resolution — is Sunday. There’s still no budget in sight.
If Republicans are truly jonesing for a constitutional amendment, and want to demonstrate that they’re even the tiniest bit fiscally responsible, maybe they should set their sights a little lower. Rather than pitching a balanced-budget amendment, how about just a budget amendment? That is, a requirement that Congress have a budget in place come Oct 1.
It would be a start.