At this morning’s press briefing, President Obama said, in response to a question about a balanced-budget amendment: “We don’t need a new law to do our jobs.” Um, yes you do! Have you seen how irresponsible you guys are with spending, especially you and the last guy, with endless wars and bailouts, etc.? And have you noticed how Democrats and Republicans tend not to work well together? You obviously need some help! But that doesn’t really address the issue of actually having a balanced-budget amendment, does it? So allow me to elaborate.
I think a balanced-budget amendment would be helpful in theory, but we all (ought to) know what would happen if we passed one: there would be some clause in it that says you could disregard the requirement for a balanced budget during a time of war or national emergency, so our honorable, trusted government would always be sure we had some war raging on all the time (kind of like now), and that the country would always be balanced on the edge of some precarious precipice (again, kind of like now), so they’d always get to spend all they wanted for whatever pet projects they favored, or to buy votes from whatever demographic, etc. So basically, it wouldn’t end up helping anyway, and it would most likely have many grave unintended consequences that would come along with it.
So it’s a good idea in theory, but it probably wouldn’t work very well. You know, kind of like everything else our government tries to do.
