Tag: balanced budget

U.S. Senate to Vote on Sen. Paul’s Balanced Budget Plan

I’ll bet you $22 billion it doesn’t pass.

Via Rand Paul

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Around 5:30 pm eastern today, the U.S. Senate will hold a vote on invoking cloture on the motion to proceed to U.S. Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) Pennies Plan balanced budget (S. 1332), which will put the Senate on record on reining in spending, ending skyrocketing deficits, and making better use of taxpayer resources.

“We teach our children that money doesn’t grow on trees, and then they grow up watching politicians pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, our debt soars past $22 trillion, endangers our country, and artificially limits what our nation can achieve. Today, the U.S. Senate can vote to put a stop to it and change course,” said Sen. Paul.

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Let’s Limit Spending

Guest Post by Walter E. Williams

Let's Limit Spending

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Some people have called for a balanced budget amendment to our Constitution as a means of reining in a big-spending Congress. That’s a misguided vision, for the simple reason that in any real economic sense, as opposed to an accounting sense, the federal budget is always balanced. The value of what we produced in 2017 — our gross domestic product — totaled about $19 trillion. If the Congress spent $4 trillion of the $19 trillion that we produced, unless you believe in Santa Claus, you know that Congress must force us to spend $4 trillion less privately.

Taxing us is one way that Congress can do that. But federal revenue estimates for 2017 are about $3.5 trillion, leaving an accounting deficit of about $500 billion. So taxes are not enough to cover Congress’ spending. Another way Congress can get us to spend less privately is to enter the bond market. It can borrow. Borrowing forces us to spend less privately, and it drives up interest rates and crowds out private investment. Finally, the most dishonest way to get us to spend less is to inflate our currency. Higher prices for goods and services reduce our real spending.

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How Tennessee Could Be About To Start A Constitutional Crisis

Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Feb 23, 2017 5:25 AM

The State Senate of Tennessee has laid the legislative groundwork for something that hasn’t been done in the United States of America since the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.  With a vote of 27-3, the Tennessee Senate has voted to call a “convention of the states” in order to draft and pass an amendment to the Constitution that would require balanced budgets to be passed every year.

For those who are little fuzzy on their high school U.S. history knowledge, the Tennessean explains that the U.S. Constitution can be amended in two ways.  The first would require a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers of Congress, an unlikely outcome in today’s hyper-partisan political arena.  The second, on the other hand, requires that two-thirds of the states (34 in total) pass a resolution calling for a Constitutional Convention.

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