spending into future fiscal years to create phantom spending cuts to stay within the deficit targets. When the economy slowed down, the deficit targets became too difficult to reach, and the legislation was scrapped in 1990.” This statutory first cut at an automatic mechanism to control spending crashed and burned. The next swipe at spending restraint was the Pay As You Go budget rule, or PAYGO. That law was based on a sequester that would automatically cut spending when Congress was unwilling to do so. Accounting gimmicks, like advanced appropriations, were used to get around this law. The sad fact is that efforts
bring a $100 trillion national debt.” This is the unsustainable element of the budget that Congress has zero willingness to address. One solution is to pass a constitutional amendment to mandate a balanced budget. When I worked at The Heritage Foundation, I wrote a paper titled “The House and Senate Balanced Budget Amendments: Not All Balanced Budget Amendments Are Created Equal.” The key to an effective budget restraint law is to put in the constitution with two key elements: First, politicians and federal judges can’t use mandatory tax hikes to balance the budget, and there can’t be waivers (like one that allows for a waiver during “military conflict that causes an imminent and serious military threat to national security”). A true declaration of war would be needed to pass an unbalanced budget during a time of war and a supermajority two-thirds vote of Congress to pass. The sad fact is that efforts to restrain spending by passing budget laws that contain both automatic cuts and triggered cuts have proven an abject failure. The three laws that proved failures were Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, PAYGO, and the Sequester. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was part of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985. This contained automatic spending cuts that were gutted by the federal courts, and Congress passed a new version in 1987 that also proved to be a failure. Michael New wrote for the Cato Institute on July 31, 2019, “While Gramm Rudman Hollings did result in some short- term spending cuts, its main outcome was creative accounting. Congress often pushed
to restrain spending by passing budget laws that contain both
automatic cuts and triggered cuts have proven an abject failure.
The last attempt was during a 2011 fight over raising the debt ceiling. Conservatives pushed something called the Cut, Cap and Balance Act that cut spending, capped future spending as a percentage of GDP, and mandated a passage of a Bipartisan Budget Act (“BBA”) as a condition to hiking the debt ceiling. This was a key provision pushed by Tea Party members and sponsored in the House by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) joined by 117 cosponsors. In the Senate, the idea was pushed by my former boss Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Mike Lee (R-UT).
American Consequences
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