There is no policy idea worse than the Balanced Budget Amendment, none. It is just insane to think that shackling the Federal government to live within its means will make things better. It is one of the things that makes Republicans look like total idiots when it comes to economic policy.
Which is why it is so disheartening to see Blue Dog Democrats pushing the party and the Administration to support this moronic idea. Yet that is what you will get if you peek in the pages of the Hill this morning.
What is worse, is why the Blue Dogs want the all Democrats to announce that they are clueless by support thing abomination, they are afraid that the mean old Republicans are going to use it against them in the 2012 election. Oh the horror!
Just take a look at this spineless quote from Henry Cuellar of Texas:
“Well, certainly if I was [the GOP], I would use this as a way of going after Democrats,” Cuellar said in an interview with The Hill. “And this is why the more centrist Blue Dogs have come out and done this.”
Look, Rep Cuellar, if you spend that much time thinking about what you’d do as a Republican, maybe you’d be happier on the other side of the aisle? That fact is even if the Democrats are dumb enough to take your crappy advice it is not going to stop the Republicans from using it against you. It never has before on any issue that the Democrats have capitulated on; why in the world would that change now?
You do have to give the Blue Dogs this one point, it is a popular idea. But the only reason it polls so well is that it is never explained in context. The idea that the federal government should have a balanced budget is an attractive one, but no one talks about what that would mean.
If the BBA was in place right now there would be two choices; to raise taxes on everyone, and quite a bit or to slash programs to the bone or end them all together. There is no getting around the fact that we are spending a trillion dollars a year more than we take in.
Given the Republicans total servitude to Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge, does anyone think, even for a moment, that there will be increased taxes to pay for this balancing of the budget? Me neither.
So the question becomes where do you find a trillion dollars in the federal budget? The three biggest cost areas are defense, Medicare and Medicaid. Even if we zeroed out entire DoD budget it would not fill the hole that we have.
And it is unreasonable to assume that defense would be where the cuts would come. The Republicans have been prattling on about “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal budget for decades, but you know what? There is nothing close to even $50 billion in these areas and that still leaves $950 billion to be found. Where is that money going to come from?
Well, social programs of course, but even there it would not be enough. There would be cuts in everything the federal government funds, including the States.
You see one of the myths about this whole idea is that the States mostly have balanced budget amendments and they seem to be doing okay (outside of the economic wasteland we are in). The problem with that is the fact that most of those budgets are balanced by great gobs of money from the federal government.
This comes in the form of money for teachers and cops. In the form of money for highway improvements or high speed rail. In the form of subsidies for unemployment.
That brings us to the other problem with this insane idea. One of the reasons we have not had a full blown depression is that the federal government pumped tons of money into the economy. The stimulus was too small (based on bad data about how bad the contraction of the economy really was) but it did keep us from going off of a cliff.
And as bad as the bank bail out turned out to be for Main Street, the trillions pumped into the financial system (directly and in the form of quantitative easing) kept the global financial system from utter collapse.
These are things that would not have happened under a BBA regime.
Then there is the final reason why this is so horrifically bad an idea. It is a Constitutional Amendment. If it is actually enacted, then it would take another one to repeal it. The last time we enacted such a bad idea was Prohibition.
The 13 years that alcohol was prohibited in the United States did not fix the problem the Temperance movement was trying to solve and it did give rise to a more organized form of organized crime. 13 years of a BBA would be enough to do irreparable harm to the United States.
It takes a 2/3 vote in each House of Congress and ¾ of the States voting to approve such a measure, then if you want to repeal it you have to have the same amount of votes. All this, for an idea that comes from the likes of the Koch Brothers and Grover Norquist.
As with most ideas from the Right they suffer from the problem that simple solutions to complex problems never work. Sure they are easy to talk about “Make the government balance the budget!” but that leaves out all the details.
That the Blue Dogs would push to have the Democratic Party as a whole support this lunacy is indicative of their complete uselessness to the party. By listening to their spineless ideas it dilutes the Democratic brand. It opens the party to the claim that we are not that different from the Republicans and makes us waste time and effort explaining that we are really not.
What we should be doing with that time and effort is educating the people on what these ideas really mean if they are enacted. I know that is a hard thing to do, but it is surely better than little a bunch of weak-willed, scaredy-cat Conservadems talk run the party to the right of where it should be.
I know we feel like we need every D seat in the Congress that we can get. But if the cost of some of these seats is having a group that consistently undermines our brand, then I am quickly coming to the point where I feel like they should be shown the door.
The floor is yours.