Question

Should the United States pass a balanced budget amendment? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

Explanation:

No, because sometimes the government needs to spend more than it takes in.

To give a singular example, if there was a balanced budget amendment in place during World War II, the United States would have been completely unable to fight the war. Financing the war effort without borrowing would have imposed an extraordinary and unsustainable tax burden upon the American people at a time when the U.S. economy was still recovering from the Great Depression. The United States spent dramatically more than it took in during World War II.

But that’s just one example. There are things you cannot budget for, like natural disasters, epidemics, wars, and financial crises. When these arise the government needs flexibility to respond to them. To explicitly deny the government that flexibility is outright lunacy. It’s the opposite of a good policy. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

In addition, it’s important to understand that government tax revenue is not always stable and predictable. Congress could pass a budget that appeared to be balanced on the day it was passed, and two months later a major recession could begin. The resulting job losses and economic contraction would drive tax receipts down below previous projections, meaning the government would now be spending more than it took in under a budget that was presumed to be balanced before the recession began. And if the government had to immediately curtail already-approved spending to bring the budget back into balance, the resulting drop in government services would worsen an economy already in recession, driving tax receipts down further and requiring further automatic cuts.

This is just bad policy. It is, frankly, an absolutely terrible idea.

It is entirely reasonable to debate the amount of debt the government should be incurring at any particular point, and to consider the long-term implications of that debt and establish plans to prevent it from becoming unduly burdensome. This is a reasonable political debate and people can realistically disagree on how much the government should be spending and how much it should be taking in and what the difference between those numbers should be. It’s a perfectly valid position to believe government debt has gotten out of control. I’m not arguing with that proposition, and have no interest in doing so here.

But there’s a difference between saying, “We have too much debt,” and saying, “The government is forbidden from ever borrowing money again.” Only one of those positions is intellectually defensible.

A constitutional requirement for a balanced budget, especially one with no exceptions or limitations as is proposed in this question, is about a bad an idea as you could possibly come up with.

Answer 2

Answer:

There is no balanced budget provision in the U.S. Constitution, so the federal government is not required to have a balanced budget and Congress usually does not pass one. Several proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution would require a balanced budget, but none have been enacted.