There hasn’t been a national Constitutional Convention since 1787, and a number of conservative groups want to change that. They are seeking to complete an effort that started several decades ago to convene a Constitutional Convention for purposes of developing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced federal budget.
In Wisconsin the push for a balanced budget amendment has taken the form of Assembly Joint Resolution 81, which was introduced on January 21 and was approved in committee early this month. AJR 81 will be debated on the Assembly floor on Tuesday, February 18th.
Although most of us would prefer that the U.S. budget be in the black as often as possible, requiring it to be balanced every year would be extremely problematic. As I noted in a Budget Project blog post about two weeks ago:
A balanced budget amendment in the U.S. Constitution would result in much longer and deeper recessions and would cause unnecessary job losses. When the economy goes into a dive and people are without jobs, the need for food stamps, health insurance and unemployment insurance rise sharply. Since tax revenue typically falls as the need for those programs rises, a balanced budget would require cuts to these safety net programs and other areas of spending at the worst possible time. That would not only take away vital help during a recession, but would also exacerbate the downturn by requiring program cuts and/or tax increases as the recession worsens.
Another significant risk of a balanced budget amendment is that it could require deep cuts in Social Security benefits and/or large increases in the taxes to fund them by precluding the use of accumulated revenue in the Social Security Trust Fund. Although the constitutional change could possibly be drafted to avoid that effect, all the balanced budget proposals that have been offered in Congress over the last couple of decades would have prohibited spending more than is taken in each year. That sort of spending limit would prevent the use of accumulated reserves and would be extremely problematic for Social Security as the “baby boom” generation keeps retiring in large numbers.
Depending on how it is drafted, a balanced budget amendment could also create numerous other problems, such as preventing Congress from responding to natural disasters. Read more about the proposed amendment in this recent article in the Progressive and in the WI Budget Project Blog.
Jon Peacock