Time to pursue Jefferson's proposal to control spending

Commentary

As members of the 112th Congress begin their work, the age-old debate will surely begin on the prudence of continued deficit spending versus the passage of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget.

Newly elected Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has already committed to introducing a Balanced Budget Amendment in the new session in an effort to begin to correct the current fiscal crisis. Lee is the honorary national chairman of our organization, Pass the Balanced Budget Amendment, a group working to pass a federal Balanced Budget Amendment by Oct. 1, 2011. Lee has rightly recognized that as the country continues to grapple with economic sluggishness, restored fiscal sanity is essential to recovery.

Critics of a federal Balanced Budget Amendment routinely claim that such a mandate would lock the country into bad fiscal policy when spending during a deficit might actually benefit the economy - such as in times of war. Some of them even claim that if a federal Balanced Budget Amendment were a good idea, the framers would have written such a mandate into our Constitution. In fact, this is hardly a new concept: Awareness of the need to potentially mandate a balanced budget extends far back in the country's history - right back to its founding.

As early as 1798, Thomas Jefferson began to talk about the potential for a constitutional amendment to ensure that the federal budget be maintained without the benefit of borrowing power. Jefferson wrote, "I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an article taking from the Federal government the power of borrowing."

Jefferson's conception of this "single amendment" is akin to how proponents of reining in federal spending envision a Balanced Budget Amendment taking shape. The current U.S. budget deficit, now estimated at $1.3 trillion, is the result of years of extreme government spending - some of it necessary, some of it superfluous - that is generally financed through the federal government's borrowing power. Jefferson apparently recognized that an easy view of the power to borrow could lead the government to assume that it had a wealth of reserves it could spend against. This misguided idea has led the United States to continually engage in reckless spending of funds we simply don't have, presuming that because a source for the money exists in the form of loans from other countries, the spending must be acceptable.

Unfortunately, the other world powers might not have our country's best financial interests at heart. Too often, their ability to lend - and keep our nation indebted to them - is a form of political power our country cannot afford either financially or politically.

That Jefferson's single amendment idea was never adopted by the early government is no reason to discount its validity, as critics of the amendment are apt to do when presented with Jefferson's thoughts. The founders were facing a deficit themselves due primarily to the cost of the Revolutionary War and very likely never considered the possibility that the country would ever find itself in the state of debt we now consider commonplace. They had a new nation to build and more pressing constitutional concerns to tackle.

We, on the other hand, have a national debt level of nearly $14 trillion, a continually weakening dollar and perpetually growing debt to foreign bondholders. In our modern-day political era, there is no issue more important in defining our collective future than avoiding national fiscal collapse by passing a federal Balanced Budget Amendment.

Those as prescient as Jefferson were aware of what the unfettered power to borrow could do to the country and were not opposed to considering balanced fiscal budgeting important enough to be adopted as a part of the law of the land. The time has come to give Jefferson's idea a new, and more serious, consideration.