Paying It Backward

A couple days ago, I did a piece on the impending bankruptcy, de facto or de jure, of the island territory of Puerto Rico.  More to the point, I made the case that whatever Congress did or did not do to address Puerto Rico's fiscal problems, it needed to do so in such a way as to prevent its massive debt load from being built up again by the leftists who typically run the place.

And the lesson for Puerto Rico is not terribly different from what could happen to the 50 states if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders somehow get into the White House and spend trillions we don't have -- kind of like Barack Obama does.

So that discussion generated the relaying of a suggestion for a Constitutional amendment that might change the financial course of the USA from this point on.  And with Republicans leading both houses of Congress, now would appear to be a good time to raise it.

I suppose I could draft the applicable text, but they won't ask me to.  So I'll simply provide the point and leave it to the J.D. types to come up with the words.  And here is the point: "The budgets passed by Congress in a given fiscal year shall not provide for any spending which may exceed the actual, unadjusted revenues brought into the Treasury in the immediate preceding fiscal year."

Make sense?  You want to spend from the Treasury on anything, from Social Security to national parks to the salary of the president, well, you need to have shown the ability to raise the necessary funds by virtue of having done so in the previous year.  No money, no spending.  You want to spend in year X on something, well, you need to show in year X-1 that you are able to raise the funds.

It's effectively a balanced budget offset by a year, or "paying it backward."  Now, I would be fine with a balanced budget of any kind, but this one is intriguing because it builds fiscal accountability into not only the budget process but into the mindset of Congress.

I'd be similarly intrigued to see such an amendment be debated before Congress.  Who proposes it?  Who makes what kinds of comments about it from the floor?  What does the press say, lapdogs of the left they are in the first place?

It's a marvelous idea that ought to be the marvelous source of a national debate on the proper role of the Federal government in our lives.  The Constitution lays out specific roles for the Federal government and then goes on specifically to state in the Tenth Amendment that if it is not in there, it is a role of the states.  So if you have to have shown the ability to raise a trillion before you are allowed to spend a trillion, then all of a sudden departments like Education and Energy and even HUD become expendable, as if they were not already.

I like the idea.  Perhaps you might want to float it past your Congressman.

I think I will float it past mine :)

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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