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Can Amending the Constitution Cure the Budget Deficit?: Yes, to Save Congress From Itself
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19979 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
1,997 Words |
| Author
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James Dale Davidson
James Dale Davidson is chairman of the National Taxpayers
Union. |
Congress recently defeated a refreshing legislative development that promised to sweep away in one bold stroke the tiresome posturing and self-deception that has characterized the politics of deficit spending. Nevertheless, the balanced budget amendment, a concept originally contemplated by Thomas Jefferson, loomed tantalizingly close to congressional passage--and could still become the law of the land someday. We would all be the richer for it.
During the 1980s our government succumbed to a chronic sickness of the soul. As the symptoms multiplied, we rushed to treat them with a series of quick remedies that ignored the underlying systemic problems.
Like so many Puritan zealots, we found moral and ethical weakness in our leaders that, somehow, we were able to overlook in more optimistic times. We decried their susceptibility to the pleas of every interest group but the ones to which we belonged. We started movements to limit congressional terms, on the theory that legislators who could not be reelected would better represent democratic ideals. Political debate fixated on symbolic issues like the Pledge of Allegiance, the death penalty, guns, and erotic art. We decried the 30-second attack commercials that media consultants devised to penetrate the ultra-cautious poses (such as being for higher spending and lower taxes) that deficits allowed candidate to assume.
In so doing, we overlooked the withering away of disciplines that once had worked effectively to restrain deficit spending. In the economic sphere, the adoption of flexible exchange rates in 1972 gave rise to massive international capital flows, which made it possible for nations to run large deficits without provoking inflation or balance of payments crises. At the same time, the deregulation of financial markets and the increasing sophistication of monetary policy eliminated many of the mechanisms that used to destabilize our economy at the first sign of fiscal irresponsibility.
In the political sphere, we witnessed the decline of our political parties as general interest institutions. Party leaders could no longer impose statesmanship on an unruly mob of independent legislators. The setting could hardly have suited better the high-tech, divide-and-conquer tactics perfected by special interest groups in the 1980s.
The enactment of the balanced budget amendment would have gone a long way toward eliminating these symptoms of political malaise. Once our leaders can no
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