The time has come for us to finally establish in our Constitution the fundamental principle that the federal government should not spend beyond its means.
Congress should adopt, and the states should ratify, an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced federal budget unless there is a 60 percent vote of Congress to the contrary.
The numbers are familiar but become more staggering with each passing year; an annual deficit of $400 billion and a total national debt of more than $4 trillion by the end of this year. That`s $16,000 of debt for every man, woman and child in the entire country.
All of this follows the 1990 budget summit in which Congress and the president were supposed to have made historic headway toward reducing the deficit. The last time we balanced the federal budget was in 1969-23 years ago.
I used to say that when we ran such huge deficits, we were living on a giant credit card and sending the bill to our children and our grandchildren. But we are paying a part of that bill already.
The gross interest payment on all this debt will reach $315 billion in fiscal year 1993. Next year, for the first time ever, interest will become the single greatest expenditure in the entire budget-higher than defense, and higher than Social Security.
Twenty percent of all federal spending goes toward gross interest payments. For all this money, we get nothing-no education, no health care, no crime prevention and no environmental protection.
That $315 billion is also a vast redistribution of wealth from taxpayers of limited means to those who are wealthy enough to invest in Treasury bills, and many of these wealthy recipients now live in places like Saudi Arabia and Japan.
The amendment I have introduced with Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) is straightforward and flexible: Total outlays may not exceed total receipts. To deal with extraordinary situations, such as a deep recession or perhaps a natural disaster, Congress may approve a specific deficit, but only by a three-fifths vote in each House. The president is required to play a leadership role by submitting a balanced budget plan to start the process.
That is essentially it. Most of the 50 states have constitutional balanced-budget requirements, and the states have been doing much better than the federal government at making hard choices to either cut spending or raise taxes.
Critics of the balanced budget amendment have said that it doesn`t really force us to do anything we can`t do now. But the reason Gramm-Rudman-Hollings- legislation designed to hold down the deficit-had only limited effect in reducing the deficit was that it was statutory, and its restraints could be changed at any time.
While Congress and the president have the ability to balance the budget, we have shown that we do not have the discipline or the political will to make the difficult choices that must be made.
We similarly didn`t need a constitutional amendment to refrain from violating the freedom of speech or freedom of religion, or to provide fair trials. We could have done all that without a constitutional requirement.
In 1798, Thomas Jefferson wrote: ”I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.”
In the bicentennial of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the time has come to follow Thomas Jefferson`s advice. This balanced budget amendment is an Economic Bill of Rights, to protect generations to come from the deficits of the past.
