I strongly agree with Congressman Vern Buchanan’s call for adopting annual federal budgets that balance revenues with spending ("Florida's next generation shouldn't pay for Washington's spending," Sept. 4).
And I agree that making this happen will likely require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Congress simply does not have the courage to take the politically painful but necessary steps otherwise.
In his guest column, Buchanan noted that he has introduced a proposed constitutional amendment that would mandate balanced federal budgets.
Buchanan's budget gimmick
Unfortunately, Buchanan’s proposed amendment – H.J. Res. 3– is much more a political gimmick than a serious attempt to get a necessary amendment actually adopted.
The congressman’s “balanced budget amendment”
is itself significantly unbalanced – and thus it has no chance of being adopted.
It is just a political gimmick intended to impress constituents, but it is drafted in a way that guarantees it has no chance of ratification.
An amendment to the Constitution needs approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of state legislatures.
In other words, if an amendment is to be ratified, it must win support from many Democrats as well as Republicans.
A fatal flaw in Buchanan's version is that it requires budgets to be balanced in an unbalanced way: no tax increases of any kind without a two-thirds vote, but no comparable restriction on spending cuts.
That tells you this is a political gimmick, and not a serious proposal.
When you load the dice on how revenues and expenditures will be balanced, you're guaranteeing that your amendment won’t get the necessary bipartisan support.
Few Democrats in Congress or state legislatures would agree to what is essentially a “spending cuts only” approach.
Nor, frankly, would many Republicans.
Not when they see how the massive spending cuts would impact farm programs, rural health care, federal law enforcement, food safety inspections and, of course, defense spending.
Buchanan describes how every business and family knows it cannot continually outspend its income.
That's true, and it's why families often look for ways to both cut expenses and increase income.
When Buchanan ran his business, didn't he occasionally raise his prices?
Don’t families sometimes look for additional overtime work – or start a weekend job – to balance their budget?
A truly serious balanced budget amendment – one actually intended to have a chance of drawing sufficient bipartisan support – would be neutral on the tax and spending decisions.
It would just focus on achieving the main goal: ensuring that Congress balances revenue and spending.
And on that, there might be sufficient bipartisan support.
Buchanan's amendment requires the president to submit a balanced budget to Congress every year and Congress to enact only expenditures that match revenues.
That's great, but it says nothing about what happens if neither the president nor the Congress complies.
That’s another major flaw in Buchanan's proposal – it has no enforcement mechanism.
Congress does not actually vote on the budget a president submits.
It adopts a dozen separate appropriations bills and perhaps some tax bills that are usually quite different from what the president has proposed.
So there is little reason for a president to submit a budget that contains extremely difficult and unpopular proposals – only to have Congress ignore it. And it's why presidents would just ignore Buchanan’s supposed “requirement.”
Buchanan should revise his proposal by creating a strong incentive for presidents to comply.
For example, it could state that if the Congressional Budget Office scores the president’s proposed budget as balanced, with any included tax changes, then Congress must vote on the entire package.
And if it is approved by a 60% vote in both houses, the entire budget is enacted.
Under those conditions, a president would have a real incentive to propose a balanced budget.
But what if Congress rejects the president’s budget and also ignores the requirement that Congress, too, must balance spending with revenue?
Here, too, an incentive is needed.
Perhaps in any year Congress does not balance spending with revenues, or obtain a supermajority exception, then certain broad-based spending cuts and tax increases would be implemented automatically on an equal basis.
That threat might put enough steel in Congress’s backbone to make its own adjustments to close the deficit gap.
Go back to the drawing board, congressman
To be clear, my objection is not to balancing a federal budget entirely through spending cuts.
But the only way to get such an amendment actually ratified is if the outcome is mandated and the process is politically neutral.
And to make it work, it must include strong incentives for compliance.
Buchanan should go back to the drawing board and come up with a serious proposal for achieving balanced federal budgets.
John Mercer is a Sarasota resident and a former Republican committee counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, where he proposed and drafted the Government Performance and Results Act. He served as a U.S. Housing and Urban Development deputy assistant secretary in President Ronald Reagan's administration. He is the former mayor of Sunnyvale, California.
Support local journalism by subscribing.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Vern Buchanan is selling a fantasy on balanced budgets | Opinion
