It seems the spoiled children just can’t get enough attention.
A group of House GOP freshmen will appear at the White House tomorrow morning with a letter demanding the president present a written plan detailing his ideas for deficit reduction.
Sadly-my own douchebag of a Congressman, the not so honorable, Mo Brooks will be among them. I’ve already written to him three times instructing him to vote for a debt ceiling raise-it seems a letter is again in order.
Bruce Bartlett goes in some detail to explain why a Balanced Budget Amendment-and the GOP’s whacked out plan to cry, cut, and fuck over is sheer political fraud.
Historically, those supporting a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution were only interested in balance per se. That is, requiring that revenues and expenditures be as close to equal as possible. The view was that if the states – almost all of which are required to balance their budgets annually – could do it then so could the federal government. One problem is that the states don’t really balance their budgets. All have separate operating and capital budgets and only the operating budget is required to be balanced. By contrast, the federal budget lumps together operating and capital expenses, such as roads and buildings that will last for decades. Moreover, the states are notorious for using gimmicks to give the appearance of budget balance even though they run deficits.
Bartlett explains at length why the amendment is flawed if not down right dangerous:
Needless to say, the problem of enforcement is even greater than with the simple sort of balanced budget amendment that was previously under discussion. Yet Republicans held exactly one day of hearings on their proposed amendment and routinely assert that further discussion is unnecessary because the idea of a balanced budget amendment has been kicking around for decades. But no previous amendment has ever contemplated limiting spending to a certain percentage of economic output–and no state or foreign country has ever attempted such a thing.
If Republicans were really serious about putting a balanced budget amendment into the Constitution they would not have written an entirely new one that is radically and conceptually different from those debated in the past, with new language that constitutional scholars have not even begun to analyze. Republicans would have held weeks of hearings with such experts and planned many more weeks of floor debate. GOP think tanks would have been urged to hold conferences and publish studies of the proposed amendment.
None of this was done, of course, leaving the inescapable conclusion that this is nothing but a political ploy designed solely to appeal to the GOP’s Tea Party wing. The time wasted debating a balanced budget amendment would be better spent taking care of the House’s long list of unfinished business, such as passing appropriations bills.
But that is the spirit of today’s Teabillie. Lacking the basic understanding of the issue, which is usually boiled down to some simplisitc buzz words like “Cut Cap and Balance”-the details remain unimportant to them.
The founding fathers never intended for it to be this way-because they presumed that one group would never be all insane at once. They also presumed that the need to compromise was well understood by all the players. Our Tri Corner hat wearing brethern are proving that idea wrong every day.
We are well and truly screwed.