In the last few days, the ugly specter of the "balanced budget amendment" has risen its nasty head again. This time its multi-billionaire David Koch (of the infamous and extremist Koch brothers), and John Kasich (who hopes to use the idea to give him a boost toward achieving the Republican presidential nomination).
These men (and many of their Republican cohorts) will tell you that the huge national debt is a danger, and that we are passing an undue burden on to our children. Neither of those is necessarily true. They think it is true because they don't want the rich (or the corporations) to have to pay their fair share of taxes, especially income taxes. They want to use a balanced budget amendment (or at least the idea of one) to cut all the social programs (the programs that help hurting Americans, keep our environment clean, and educate our children), while also cutting taxes for the rich and the corporations.
The truth is that just a small raising of taxes for the rich, and actually making the corporations pay some taxes (currently many of them don't pay anything at all), would eliminate our budget deficit and allow us to start paying down the national debt. All you have to do is look at the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton to see that. When he left office there was no budget deficit. There was a budget surplus. It was the Bush administration, by cutting taxes for the rich and starting to unnecessary and unpaid-for wars, that put the budget back in deficit and ballooned the national debt.
These men, and other Republicans, will also try to claim that the federal government is just like a state or a family -- both of which must live within their budget or go bankrupt. That is just not true. There are many differences, but perhaps the biggest is that neither states nor families have the ability to print money -- but the federal government does. The federal government could pay every penny of its debt tomorrow by simply printing up a bunch of new dollars.
We don't want them to do that, because it would have a negative effect on inflation -- but it could be done. A far more reasonable approach (and one that would work even better) would be to raise taxes on the rich by a small amount, get rid of loopholes and subsidies that let profitable corporations avoid paying any taxes, pass a real job creation program, make substantial and reasonable cuts to the bloated military budget, and put money back into the economy by fully funding social programs (which would create more jobs by increasing demand).
Another thing these fools will not tell you is that the United States government has ALWAYS had a national debt, from the administration of George Washington to the present -- and that has not kept this country from flourishing. In fact, it has helped the country to flourish. Sometimes that debt has been large and sometimes it has been small, but it has never gone away. That debt is neither inherently good or bad, but has allowed our government to respond to emergencies and keep our country (and its economy) on track.
And finally, they will try to convince you of one other lie -- that most of our national debt is owned by foreign countries, and this will mean we as a country, are now (or soon will be) owned by those other countries (like China). The truth is that most of the national debt of the United States is owned by Americans (and always has been).
There is no reason why the federal government should have to have a balanced budget, and writing that kind of requirement into our Constitution is stupid. The "balanced budget amendment" is just a con game being run on the American people. A con game that would allow Republicans to cut necessary programs without looking like the hard-hearted and mean-spirited politicians that they really are.
