103 House Republicans sent a letter to House Republican leadership calling for a solution that could resolve the current debt limit impasse and prevent the bigger, Greece-like debt crisis just over the horizon: Cut, Cap, and Balance.
1. Cut – We must make discretionary and mandatory spending reductions that would cut the deficit in half next year.
2. Cap – We need statutory, enforceable caps to align federal spending with average revenues at 18% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with automatic spending reductions if the caps are breached.
3. Balance – We must send to the states a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) with strong protections against federal tax increases and a Spending Limitation Amendment (SLA) that aligns spending with average revenues as described above.
With each passing day our nation’s fiscal health gets worse, leaving our children and grandchildren falling further into debt. Democrats seem to have given up, proposing even more borrowing in response to our massive debt addiction. With the problem growing larger every day, we must move quickly and unite behind a plan to cut spending and get our budget into balance.
Agree with the idea, disagree with a balanced budget amendment.
The reason I disagree with such an amendment is that it could seriously hamstring our country’s ability to pay for defense. At the time of our founding, any such action for the defense of our country was to be paid for by extraordinary means that were to be ended when such conflicts ended. I believe that Bush had it right, however one might think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by not including the price of the wars within the normalized annual budget for the Defense Dept. And the question should have been, like some intimated at the time, although for differing reasons, of how to pay for the wars.
If language was included that any armed conflict our country engaged in, and the monetary costs, was not to be included within the considered annual budget used in comparisons for the Amendment proposed, and that the payment of such conflict was to be by extraordinary means, and only for the duration of the armed conflict, by law, then I could support such an amendment.