Balanced budget bid brokered by Toomey
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WASHINGTON -- A united Republican Senate caucus introduced a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget Thursday, in a deal brokered in part by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.
The freshman was joined by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and 15 other Republicans at a Capitol news conference to announce the amendment, which caps spending and revenues at 18 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.
"Getting our fiscal house in order, getting a balanced budget, is an absolutely necessary precondition for the strong economic growth and job creation that frankly we were sent here to accomplish," Mr. Toomey said.
Approval will be no easy task. The amendment must pass both chambers with a two-thirds majority and be ratified by 38 states.
There are signs of limited Democratic support for a balanced budget requirement. Last month, 10 Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman joined all 47 Republicans in voting for a nonbinding resolution expressing support for a balanced budget amendment of some kind. The one proposed by Republicans on Thursday will kick in five years after ratification and allows for Congress to vote on a yearly basis to suspend the cap, with a lower threshold during wartime. Mr. Toomey helped forge the compromise by melding two competing GOP proposals.
One of them was led by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who championed the closest attempt for a balanced budget amendment, which fell one vote short of passing the Senate in 1997. Then, Mr. Hatch noted, the deficit was a comparably tiny $100 billion.
"Had we passed that, we wouldn't be in the terrible fiscal distress we're in today," he said.
The progressive Economic Policy Institute attacked the bill's 18 percent of GDP spending requirement as overly draconian and impossible without drastic entitlement and agency cuts. Last year the government spent more than 24 percent of GDP. If the balanced budget amendment passes this year, EPI calculated it will require a spending cut of $1.1 trillion by 2016 when it kicks in.
Questioned on the 18 percent figure, Mr. Hatch said it came from an average of spending over the past half-century. Then Mr. Toomey jumped in to defend the figure.
"As recently as 2007, total federal spending was just barely over 19 percent of GDP," Mr. Toomey said. "And that was a time, I'd argue, that Congress was not at all trying to exercise any fiscal discipline, and yet virtually by accident there they were at just over 19 percent. It wouldn't take a big lift from there to get us down to 18."
First Published April 1, 2011 12:00 am
