A Great Point

Reader comment on: Rubio on a Balanced Budget Amendment

Submitted by John Gillis (United States), Dec 14, 2011 17:29

The idea that an amendment is needed to enforce a balanced budget is an unbalanced idea. This editorial makes a great point that Gingrich and Clinton managed to pull it off. And of course other Presidents and Congresses have done so over the history of America.

The enshrining in an amendment of such a specific fact as "18%" is a sure sign of a failure of leadership and political philosophy.

A) The more correct number for a free economy would probably be in the very low single digits, so it's laughable (in a painful way) to talk about something close to one-fifth of the entire economy going yearly to the bureaucracy, and that's "sanctioned" by the Constitution, if enacted.

B) The idea that legal chicanery couldn't get around this limit, is also naive. Just change the meaning of GDP (which has been done before), and you've got some breathing room to steal more from the citizenry, and I'm sure there are other shady legal-political tricks that I can't even think of.

The answer has to be the destruction of the ethos of welfare statism. Only that will stop the bleeding of the body politic from the ten thousand cuts.

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