BALANCED BUDGET IS A MUST, SAYS SIMON

A balanced-budget constitutional amendment is essential if Congress is to rein in the massive federal deficit, maintains Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill.

But while passage is predicted in the House, Simon said the vote in the Senate will be close.

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, is lobbying his colleagues to reject the measure.

"We are going to have a real fight in the Senate and it is going to be a close vote," Simon said in a telephone interview from his capitol hill office.

He said he feels there were sufficient votes in the Senate to pass it two weeks ago, but that support has weakened since then.

But Simon said he's still hopeful the measure will pass. "There certainly is hope," he said.

The House is expected to vote on the amendment this week, with Senate action to follow later this month.

A two-thirds majority in both houses is needed for passage of the amendment. The measure would then have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

Simon, who is the chief sponsor of the measure in the Senate, said he believes citizens favor such an amendment. "This is one issue where the people are ahead of the politicians."

Simon said requiring a balanced federal budget would force some fiscal discipline upon lawmakers.

"There is no question that to have the amendment is going to involve a little bit of pain." But he added, "It's kind of like a cancer operation: the sooner you have it, the better."

The federal deficit is expected to hit a record $400 billion this year, and the gross federal debt continues to grow.

"The last time the Senate voted on this amendment, in 1986, opponents said all that is lacking to control the deficit is political will, and, of course, they were right," Simon said in prepared remarks last week.

"That year, the gross federal debt was a little over $2 trillion. Now, just six years later, it is about to pass the $4 trillion mark, and gross interest ($315 billion in the 1993 budget) is about to become the top spending item for the first time in our history, having passed both defense and Social Security.

"In the meantime," he said, "the political will is still absent, and the stakes for our inaction have risen steeply."

For the first 175 years of the nation's history, the federal government had a balanced budget 75 percent of the time.

"During the past 25 years, 4 percent of the time we have had a balanced budget. This makes clear the wisdom of considering Thomas Jefferson's advocacy of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution," Simon said.

According to Simon's office, 1969 was the last year there was a balanced federal budget.

Opponents argue that the amendment would require a balanced budget, without specifying how to do it.

Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations have split over how to shrink the deficit for years, and even though Presidents Bush and Reagan have long supported such an amendment, neither has come close to proposing a balanced budget, Simon has said.

He acknowledged that the amendment doesn't spell out the details of how to obtain a balanced budget.

But he maintained such procedures are best left to statutes, which can be fine-tuned and adjusted.

"As a permanent addition to the Constitution, this proposal instead establishes for the guidance of all elected officials, present and future, the fundamental principle that government should not routinely spend beyond its means," Simon said.

The Illinois Democrat said some opponents of the amendment view it as a threat to domestic programs. "In fact, the threat to domestic investments comes precisely from the fact that runaway deficits are sending interest payments higher and higher," he said.

"In inflation-adjusted terms, during the past 10 years, non-defense discretionary programs the programs for which I have fought have fallen 11 percent, while gross interest has risen 105 percent.

"Unless we cap the interest cost with this amendment, the picture for the next 10 years will be even worse," Simon said.

"Outside the (Washington) beltway, there is an understanding that fiscal discipline is healthy. In fact," he said, "it is vital to our future."

The senator said, "Unless we cap the money wasted on interest, we will become increasingly paralyzed into inaction on our most urgent national priorities, from education to infrastructure investments to health care."