The Balanced Budget Amendment Is A Sham
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | MARCH 8, 2018
“If Members who supported the tax bill were really interested in balancing the budget, they never would have voted to unbalance the budget by $1.5 trillion.”
The national news these days is dominated by Trump stories – the Russia Probe, Trump and his Administration’s ethics abuses, stories of chaos in the White House.
Meanwhile, other important efforts are quietly playing out in Washington and they deserve the public’s attention.
One such effort is a coming move by the House Republican leadership to vote in the near future on a constitutional amendment to require a federal balanced budget.
This effort is pure politics designed to provide cover for House Republicans in the 2018 elections. It belongs in the hypocrisy Hall of Infamy.
These are the same Republicans who passed a massive tax cut last year that added a staggering $1.5 trillion to the deficit, with the tax breaks going primarily to corporations and wealthy Americans.
It was a different story when it came to renewing the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) program, which ran out last September. This program provides essential health care benefits to children. When House Republicans were considering spending $75 billion to renew CHIP, they demanded that a similar amount be cut from other federal programs that provided medical benefits for other people.
No such offsets, of course, were considered for the $1.5 trillion spent on tax cuts.
A letter to Members sent in the last Congress from more than 270 national organizations opposing the amendment said that “a balanced budget amendment is a recipe for making recessions more frequent, longer, and deeper,” and noted that “it would almost certainly necessitate massive cuts in major programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits.”
No one should be fooled here.
If Members who supported the tax bill were really interested in balancing the budget, they never would have voted to unbalance the budget by $1.5 trillion.
When the Balanced Budget Amendment comes to the floor, it should be treated as the sham it is and voted down.
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Fred Wertheimer is the Founder and President of Democracy 21, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen our democracy and ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections.
