There’s a challenge with proposing a balanced budget amendment. It’s not popular with sitting politicians. It basically says that the freedoms that past politicians exploited to spend money irresponsibly won’t be applied to current politicians. This terrifies any politician who doesn’t have fiscal responsibility on their agenda.
It’s important to note that nearly all Republicans and a good number of Democrats in Washington DC support the idea of a future balanced budget amendment, but they are unwilling to support one today. That’s why the only way we’ll ever see one in this country is if it’s imposed through a state-imposed amendment. The DC Cartel will never take away their own ability to spend without restraint whether it’s the Democrats or the moderate Republicans. They want to continue to kick the can down the road knowing full well that the road itself may end before they take the measures to fix the problem.
At $19 trillion, the national debt has become so gargantuan that it’s considered by many to be impossible to fix. To put it into perspective, if we were somehow able to go back 2016 years to 1 BC and start writing checks every minute until today, those checks would have to be over $15,000 in order to bring the debt down to $0. That’s right, we’d need to write $15,000 checks every minute nonstop for over 2,000 years to get the balance down to zero. That’s why everyone knows we need to balance the budget and prevent future governments from returning to our unsustainable ways.
The Balanced Budget Amendment is to Republicans as stopping climate change is to the Democrats. The difference is that the first is absolutely needed without a doubt while the latter is still up for debate about its validity.
Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz signed a pledge today to help the states get their amendment. It requires 34 states to attempt a convention and 38 states to ratify an amendment. We will likely see another candidate or two sign the pledge (John Kasich is certain to sign it), but even “conservatives” such as Marco Rubio and Donald Trump would never sign it because they don’t want it to happen in their Presidency. It’s a hard choice to make: do the right thing for current and future generations or keep playing the sordid game that the DC Cartel has been playing for decades with an emphasis on the last 15 years of irresponsible budgets.
Nobody’s asking the government to stop spending. They’re asking the government to spend the money they’re able to collect without expanding beyond those constraints. Every day in Washington DC politicians are robbing the future to pay for the past. It’s like a family trying to solve a debt problem by getting more credit cards to increase their limits. Eventually, they won’t be able to get more credit cards and their paychecks will be spent paying debt rather than paying for current and future needs. That’s where we are today in Washington DC. Everyone there knows it. The media won’t discuss it because they’re just as terrified by the large debt number as the DC Cartel is. Better for everyone to stick their head in the sand and hope that nobody sees the problem until a future general takes the issues seriously.
According to Cruz, “the Washington Cartel has put special interest spending ahead of the American people, driving our nation’s debt to over $19 trillion. A child born today is already $59,000 in debt and that is just wrong. It is clear to me that only the states can fix this problem.”
The only reason that this isn’t bigger news is because everyone is crossing their fingers and hoping it doesn’t implode before their terms are done in Washington DC. They know it’s broken and must be fixed. They’re just hoping someone else will fix it after they’ve had their fun as elected officials without restrictions.