Why Not a Balanced-Budget Amendment for Washington?
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John Cogan’s suggestion to centralize congressional budgeting (“Congress Once Constrained Government Debt,” op-ed, Jan. 24), while a useful idea, probably won’t suffice to stop a looming national debt crisis. The short-term political gains to members of Congress from deficit-financed spending exceed the political costs.
From 1789 to 1930, the federal government ran 101 budget surpluses and only 39 deficits. As the late Nobel laureate James Buchanan and Richard Wagner put it nearly a half-century ago, we had an unwritten fiscal constitution, one that lost its effectiveness after the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s.
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