Balanced budget

The ability to construct and pass a balanced budget already is within the power of the president, Congress and the American people. Were there a direct link between what ought to be done and what actually was done, in fact, the country wouldn’t need a balanced-budget amendment. And people would get to bed at a respectable hour and forgo that second Twinkie.

Fortunately for special-interest groups, coffee producers and diet centers, none of those things happen. Unfortunately, federal budgets regularly come in at 125 percent of expected revenues, pushing the country ever deeper into debt. Though the way to deal with the problem always is present, the will is long absent.

The country can’t afford to continue to build up its enormous debt while Keynesian scholars fine tune government policy. The nation is $3.6 trillion in debt now and will be $4 trillion in debt when the next budget is passed. The major portion of tax dollars, more than $315 billion, goes to financing the debt, restricting all other areas of government and limiting the country’s ability to respond to crisis.

Critics of the balanced-budget amendments in Congress dislike the proposed constitutional additions both because they limit the ability of government to respond to the normal cycles of the economy and because they leave a loophole in which three-fifths of the Congress can agree to override the balanced-budget rule. These are legitimate concerns, and were not the government driven to its knees by the current debt and its inability to propose a balanced budget, they might even be persuasive.

The amendments are akin to a family cutting up its credit cards to help it get out of debt. It may have been poor spending choices, not the credit cards’ fault, for the debt, but chopping up the cards, thereby putting an end to the easy access to debt, can help the family out of the financial hole it is in. The proposed amendments are more complicated than that, but they make the same point by making overspending harder to do and by recognizing the importance of fiscal restraint.

In a recent letter to The New York Times, Ernest J. Oppenheimer, author of the book “Balancing the Federal Budget,” not only endorsed the ideas behind the amendments, but suggested ways to make the budget balance. He would cut defense spending in half, saving $150 billion annually; raise the gasoline tax 20 cents a year for five years, adding $100 billion in revenue; levy a temporary surcharge on estate taxes to pay for the savings and loan bailout, raising $50 billion; and cut entitlement programs and go after waste and inefficiency to save another $100 billion. His total matches the 1992-93 deficit of $400 billion.

Washington doesn’t work that neatly, of course. But Mr. Oppenheimer’s suggestions are a good place to begin serious discussions about bringing the government back to fiscal reality. A balanced-budget amendment would ensure that it stayed there.