ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 20, 1996 TAG: 9611200044
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
BALANCING the federal budget is an excellent idea. Amending the Constitution to require balanced budgets is a bad idea.
The distinction is apparently understood by President Clinton, who has worked toward the former while opposing the latter. The president's position is not only wise but perhaps also, given public sentiment in favor of a balanced-budget amendment, politically courageous.
Yet in classic Clintonesque fashion, the president last week blurred the distinction - making it all the less likely the public will come to understand the flaws of the balanced-budget amendment, and all the more likely it will get through Congress next year.
While presidents have no formal voice in constitutional amendments, presidential influence helped to stop the amendment in the Senate this year, one vote short of the required two-thirds majority. But the other day, answering a reporter's question after a bill-signing ceremony, Clinton appeared to soften his position. A balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution could work, he allowed, if it included an escape hatch to allow deficit spending to help "the country ... manage a recession."
Was the president signaling his awareness that the Nov. 5 elections may have altered the Senate enough to put the amendment on a winning track? Or did it simply slip his mind that the campaign is over, and that he longer need modulate his every view to the precise tune that will garner the most votes?
The damage-control operation was up and running within 24 hours. Clinton will continue to "actively oppose" the proposed amendment, said Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The president didn't misspeak himself, the spin went, but it is not possible to write an amendment with the necessary escape hatches if conditions change. That it was Rubin who led the way is significant. No proponent of big-spending profligacy, the former Wall Street businessman is a fiscal hawk who initially helped guide the administration toward deficit-reduction.
More deficit reduction is needed today because of the coming pressures on Medicare and Social Security. But a fiscal-policy prescription appropriate for the conditions and peculiar demographics of the moment shouldn't be enshrined in the Constitution as fit policy for virtually all occasions save national emergencies.
Nor is the definition of a balanced budget nearly as self-evident as the amendment's proponents seem to think. As understood today, the term at the federal level does not distinguish between operating and long-term capital spending, which tends to exaggerate the deficit, nor between Social Security moneys and general funds, which tends (for now) to underestimate the deficit. By contrast, states, municipalities and the private sector routinely separate capital outlay from operating budgets. As for Social Security finances, they have been combined into the general federal budget only since the 1960s.
Constitutionalizing these issues is an open invitation for the courts to do the defining, amid constant litigation, with a potentially tremendous impact on fiscal policy that properly belongs with the executive and legislative branches.
Instead of bending with the crowd, the president should work to educate the public as to why a balanced-budget amendment is less attractive than it might seem at first glance.
LENGTH: Medium: 61 linesby CNB