"Balanced budget amendment revived; House debate on long-shot plan to start" November 17, 2011|By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff
A secondary show that faces long odds in a deeply divided Congress because it will require significant Democratic support. It could gain the necessary two-thirds majority in the Republican-controlled House, but has less chance of clearing the Democrat-controlled Senate....
Even if it passes both chambers with two-thirds majorities, it would be years before it could take effect. Ratification by three-quarters of the states could take years, and the measure the House is taking up would not take effect until five years after that.
Advocates say it will impose discipline on federal spending that has driven the gross national debt to $15 trillion, roughly equal to the US gross domestic product. Opponents, including many economists, say it is a largely symbolic ploy that avoids the hard choices of where to cut spending or increase revenue....
The resolution’s chief sponsors, Representatives Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, and Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, said in a joint statement, “The average amount each citizen owes on the debt is now greater than his or her average salary.’’
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Rudolph Penner, an economist, former Congressional Budget Office director and fellow at the Urban Institute. “Right now, we have all these proposals to stabilize our fiscal condition and none of them actually balances the budget until the 2030s. We’re so far underwater now, it’s hard to see us surfacing within the time horizon of this amendment.’’
“The politics are quite transparent,’’ said Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard. “It’s easier to agree on a balanced budget amendment than which programs to cut, which taxes to raise, or which deductions to eliminate.’’
Simon Johnson, professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, said creating a cap without constraining Medicare and Medicaid costs will create “a series of big budget crises’’ in coming years.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said....
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