Robert E. Rogoff (Voice, Feb. 18) apparently is not aware of Sen. Paul Simon’s years of effort to enact constitutional, structural budget reform. He asks why Simon did not propose his version of the balanced budget amendment “at any time during the deficit-spending spree of the first 12 years of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton administration.”
In fact, Simon first introduced a proposed amendment more than a decade ago and several years later, in 1986, the Simon version of the balanced budget amendment lost by just one vote in the Senate. Opponents argued then that Congress and President Reagan didn’t need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.
The underlying federal debt that year was $2 trillion. Just eight years later, the debt has more than doubled to about $4.4 trillion. Incredibly enough, opponents are using the same argument again this time.
