[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I don’t care about the deficit. Obama never did and the idiot press never said word one about Trillion dollar deficits. One was closer to 2 Trillion than 1 trillion.

The Obama debt explosion certainly puts deficit hawk considerations in perspective. People who advocate for a balanced budget amendment never seem to fathom the reality that such an amendment would be an engine of tax increases, nothing else.

The fact is that raising taxes does indeed easily reach the point of diminishing ^negative returns. The capital gains tax - which is triggered by voluntary taxpayer action of realizing the gains - is Exhibit “A." Corporate income taxation of foreign profits is Exhibit "B.”

If you want to amend the Constitution to balance the budget, your amendment should attack the spending side of the budget only, and it should have teeth that Congress will respect. IOW, it should limit current-year government spending to last year’s revenue. And exceeding that limit should penalize Congressmen. And the only way to seriously penalize Congressmen would be to impose term limits.

Of course, you also have to consider how to safely enable Congress to control spending by a lawless president such as Obama. There we had the fox in charge of chicken coop security.

[Jim from C-Town]

The only way a balanced budget amendment could even be considered is if the Federal budget was capped at a maximum percentage of the previous year’s GDP in the same amendment.