Balanced budget

A so-called congressional "supercommittee" will try to find $1.5 trillion in new federal spending cuts this fall, but -- especially since Congress has a tendency to count fantasy "cuts" set for years in the future -- that's too small to seriously reverse ongoing massive budget deficits. So Republicans this fall will be pressing a far more ambitious goal: a constitutional amendment to require something Franklin Roosevelt promised Americans in 1932: a "federal budget annually balanced."

"Spending cuts and caps are steps in the right direction," explains Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. But a balanced budget amendment is "the only permanent solution to control government spending and end our nation's spending-driven debt crisis."

House GOP leaders -- still short of the two-thirds margin required to pass the amendment -- have held off scheduling a vote. But both the House and the Senate are required to hold votes on an amendment this fall as one of the conditions of recently enacted legislation to raise the borrowing cap.

It's still an uphill battle politically, even though Republicans control the House with larger numbers than they had in 1995, when a balanced budget amendment sailed through the chamber with 300 votes. (It then fell one supporter short of the required two-thirds margin in the Senate.) That's because the GOP this time is pushing a more stringent version of the amendment that would require a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate to authorize future tax hikes. It also would require government programs to be shrunk to more historically normal levels by capping spending at 18 percent of the nation's total economic output each year. This year, government spending is running an astonishing 25 percent of GDP.

A balanced budget amendment is worth a try, but a badly designed amendment could become a recipe for nothing but further crippling tax hikes. A two-thirds majority requirement for tax hikes -- much like the one already imposed in the state of Nevada -- is a wise idea. Real revenue emergencies -- something akin to another Pearl Harbor -- would easily produce two-thirds majorities in both houses.