no thanks, I don’t want state legislatures changing the Constitution and then having their decisions rubber stamped.
pass on that.
The reason that amending the constitution is hard is because that is how the founders wanted it to be.
The constitution should not be subject to the fads or trends of public opinion.
A constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget would only result in ever raising taxes to cover a never ending spending by congress, for congress cannot skim from what they don’t spend. We need a Constitutional Amendment making members of government, including Congress, punishable by death if they are caught and convicted of any crime.
A balanced budget amendment is ill conceived. It gives the Left tremendous power and justification for raising taxes which are deadly. And it sidesteps the heart of America’s political and economic problem: big government. The deficit is not deadly. It’s not good, but it’s not deadly. Our economy is running and even thriving despite all the interference of the feds and despite the feds deficit.
Deadly to an economy and individual wealth and financial wholeness is raising taxes. Taxes are an economy killer.
The real key is applying a deadly blow, if one is possible, to the unconstitutional activities and bureaucracies, like the $1 trillion HHS, of the $4 trillion federal government which needs to be cut by at least 80%. That will automatically force deficits lower. Government will always spend more than it takes in. The key is shrinking government.The deficit of a relatively small government will be relatively small.
I'm not sure that there is enough money on Earth to borrow that much :-)
But, in essence, expansion of the government is the prime function of the government. Everything else will be sacrificed, if necessary, such as:
It's like taking the wallet away from a drug addict and thinking that he will now get a job. There are always solutions of complex problems that are simple and wrong.
Take, for example, those social programs. About half of taxes is spent on those. However the society, like another drug addict, is dependent on those because there are no jobs for those who want to work, and there are plenty of recipients who do not want to work (nor know how, for generations.) Some, destroyed by decades of drugs and crime, are entirely unemployable (unless you are hiring into a street gang.) Terminating their food allowance will not result in them magically getting employed - it will result in them going Ferguson in every city and every town of the country. The government is sitting on a big social bomb; as they don't want to start a decade-long process of defusing it, they resort to a cheaper and simpler process of stuffing more powder into it. Though the size of the nonproductive class is already large enough to shake up this country if social assistance is cancelled or reduced.
This means that the debt of the country is primarily an effect of a larger cause. That cause is simply that the country is neither able nor willing to provide every citizen with an honest, productive job that is worth the time. The country chose to simply feed the unwanted population to avoid a social unrest. As that unwanted population grows, more and more money is needed to feed them, and the cost of servicing that debt also increases. You usually want to strike at the root cause of the problem; in this case it would be to put people to work, so that the USD would have real value in it, outside of external oil trade. It would have value if other countries can buy large amounts of various US goods for US currency. Right now the USD has value only because of historical and political reasons, which makes it vulnerable.
Here is one idea as an example. As you know, a certain President many years ago made a commitment to develop the US space program - and that was done. Today another President could commit the entire country to another challenge - say, to develop and produce a usable anthropomorphic robot that could replace human labor. This program would use existing US leadership in electromechanics, computers, and AI research. This program could occupy lots of people, from machinists to programmers and scientists. This program, once successful, would result in a significant increase of wealth of the society. The country would be able to produce goods again, for less than China is doing today, as robots don't require medical insurance or generous OSHA rules or 52-hour work week.
Maybe, how many combat divisions do they have?
One more paragraph somewhere isn't going to restrain the Federal Government if they refuse to follow what we have now.