An Improved Balanced Budget Amendment By J. Huston McCulloch
This article appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of The Independent
Review An ineffective or poorly written balanced budget
amendment would be worse than none at allso its good that the
version most House Republicans supported in 2011 failed to pass.
One provision necessary to make a balanced budget amendment
effective is a definition of outstanding debt that includes
monetary instruments issued by the Federal Reserve. The national
debt of the U.S. government has doubled to $15.2 trillion in the
past four years. The statutory national debt ceiling has proven
ineffective in restraining runaway deficit spending, so that a
constitutional amendment that requires a supermajority of both
houses of Congress to raise the debt ceiling is long overdue.
However, an ineffective or ill-written balanced budget amendment
would be worse than none at all. On November 28, 2011, 62
percent of the House of Representatives voted in favor of a
proposed balanced budget amendm