BALANCED BUDGET MAKES SENSE TO AMERICANS

For 20 years, high on the list for Americans hoping to tame the runaway excesses of the federal government has been a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. During this entire time, despite overwhelming public support, congressional leaders who opposed the amendment managed to thwart the proposal, although by narrow margins in recent years. Last November's electoral earthquake produced new House and Senate majorities pledged to enact the amendment. In the case of the House, there was a further pledge to pass it within the first 100 days. Indeed, the new House majority passed the balanced budget amendment by an overwhelming 300-127 vote. The proposal now awaits action in the Senate.

It is important to note a missing feature that should have been included in the version the House passed. As proposed in the Republican Contract With America and in the original version the GOP leadership supported, a three-fifths majority vote would have been required for raising taxes. This was a response to real fears that without this safeguard, the new amendment could become a powerful legal tool of the Washington tax-and-spend machine. As 8th District Rep. Bill Emerson stated the issue, "Raising taxes should be a matter of last resort. The process of raising taxes should not be simple or easy. We need a mechanism to force spending reduction before new taxes are levied just as we need a mechanism to force prioritization of spending issues to achieve a balanced budget."

Although a majority of House members supported this feature, backers fell short of the two-thirds majority required to pass a constitutional amendment that included it. Facing this eventuality, amendment supporters chose the possible over the perfect, and the amendment passed easily.

Other important features of the House-passed version include a provision for a balanced budget waiver during a declaration of war, or during an imminent threat to national security, as well as a workable time-frame for implementing a balanced budget. The latter provision states that the amendment is effective in 2002, or the second fiscal year after ratification by three-fourths of the states, whichever is later.

Easy Senate passage of the House version is expected, once that body disposes of the interminable talking and other delay strategies planned by a liberal Senate dinosaur, Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Then it will be on to the legislatures of all the states for 50 debates on ratification, where the main concern will be that the amendment not accomplish a balanced federal budget by dumping burdens on the states. This is a real concern but one that is met and answered, both in this proposed amendment and in the ban on unfunded federal mandates that is also part of the GOP contract moving through the Congress.

Rep. Emerson, who has supported the amendment for his entire, 14-year congressional tenure, is joined by Missouri's two U.S. senators, Kit Bond and John Ashcroft, in backing the amendment. They know that the federal budget can be balanced by the year 2002 merely by restraining the annual increase in federal spending from its current 5.4 percent to an annual growth of 3 percent. In a budget of more than $1.6 trillion, that doesn't sound too harsh.

If, as expected, the amendment is enacted, supporters will have kept faith with the 80-plus percent of Americans who back this amendment and with the ancient wisdom of President Thomas Jefferson. The Sage of Monticello expressed timeless wisdom when he said: "The question whether one generation has the right to bind another by the deficit is a question of such consequence as to place it among the fundamental principles of government. We should consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves."