Eturnalshift wrote:
You're right. Even the Tea Party knew that... but, in large, they weren't demanding a balanced budget for next year. Where the tea party won is by getting the ball moving on a balanced budget amendment which, in the end, if ratified, would force balanced budgets - that's what they want. They got what they wanted and, in exchange, they gave the votes needed to pass the debt ceiling. Welcome to politics.
That's not even constitutional (for reasons we've already explored - Congress can't abrogate its own authority without an actual amendment to the Constitution), let alone politically or financially feasible.
It would also be even more short-sighted and flatly bad policy than the debt itself. Governments - and businesses - and hell, even biological organisms, sometimes need to run deficits. If there are hard times - a war, a major economic downturn, a catastrophe of national scale such as a terrorist attack or weather disturbance or nuclear disaster - the government will need to run a deficit to do what must be done to get the nation through the troubles. It's flatly irrational to argue that governments should keep ledgers equally even when times are easy and revenues high, and when times are bad and revenues low.
It would also be very bad for the country as a whole. Deficit spending is actually good policy, provided the deficit is less than inflation and rate of growth, because what it does - and it was Alexander Hamilton who first grasped this - is it makes banks, investors and even foreign states stakeholders in the government, without actually giving them any real influence over policy. They have an interest in keeping the American government stable, but they can't actually affect it directly in any way.
All those are conceptual reasons why a balanced budget amendment is unwise. More important than those conceptual reasons, though, is the here-and-now reality that most of Congress understands those facts. People like to blame Congress for the nation's ills but they fail to see that our system is - still - the best in the world, and that our problems are more connected to complex social issues, special interests, and a very few, very bad policies enacted in recent years. What I mean to say is - flatly, it's not going to happen, so holding up all business is quixotic and terrible politics. That kind of brinksmanship the Tea Party engaged in is banana republic behavior.
So yeah, balanced budget amendment is drivel.