Balanced Budget Amendment

No worries about Round One, now onto Round Three.To refute your first point:The example of a bonus is ill fitting. Tax revenue is not a bonus, even though that's how government has treated it lately, its the livlihood of the government. Yes there will be decisions that will have to be made but by the end of sorting through the tax revenues all programs that need funding will get funding. While Jane might not get a new hairdryer Dad's car will get gas. There will have to be choices but choices in the name of fiscal responsibility are good. There will be pain and there will be fighting but at the end of the day, as you said yourself, a resolution was passed in the nick of time. That's how our government runs, obviously it runs this way anyways even without a BBA so why can't we ask it to run responsibly? In fact your entire point has been proved false by several studies. "Importantly,these studies find that stringency does matter for fiscal policy. For example, Poterba (1994) shows that states with more stringent restraints were quicker to reduce spending and/or raise taxes in response to negative revenue shocks than those without." [4] These stuides show that states and organizations with stricter fiscal policy are actually faster at responding to emergencies that require funding than looser fiscal policies. To refute your second point:What you are refering to here is responsible lending. A reasonable loan to a debt free family who is recieving steady income. This is not a $5,000,000 loan to a family who already is in debt 15 million. A bank would never make such a loan. Like I said in Round One there would be areas that loans would be acceptible such as wartime. Also when a family takes out a loan that $300,000 doesn't factor into their budget, the morgage payments do. So if the government wanted to take out a loan they would have to factor that payment into their balanced budget. If they want to borrow money thats fine but the morgage payments so to speak must then be factored into the balanced budget. To refute your third point:The debt problem is a problem that is due to deficit spending. All of our presidents since Reagan have operated under deficit spending, even Clinton who supposedly ran a "surplus" still managed to increase the debt. [1] In 2011 we had a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit! [2] There was no stimulus spending this year my friend. We in fact have pulled out of Iraq and are long past the shockwaves of the initial market collapse in 2008 and still manage to add 1.3 trillion dollars to the debt. Your point about long term spending is irrelevent since fiscal situation, with budgets or not, is different every year. Families, companies and the government all spend and gain different amounts different years. In fact a balanced budget would help long term spending because with strict guidelines for monetary spending making it easier to imagine how money will be spent because there will no longer be huge programs that gobble up infinite amounts of money year after year because it would have to adhere to a budget. Also Japan has a socialist style government and focus on much different aspects of society than we do here in the US so the idea doesn't transfer well. And if you look in the past 30 years Japan has had serious fiscal troubles especially in the 80's and 90's. The Idea That Debt is OkayIn our day and age the idea of debt isn't bad and is even in some cases considered good. In the American tradition debt was always considered bad and every president leading up to Woodrow Wilson attempted to bring it down to manageable levels. Andrew Jackson even eliminated the national debt in 1835 [3] with no ill affects to the country and was and should still be lauded for such an achievement. We don't need debt, we don't need loans and we don't need deficit spending. Debt is bad, it's not good in any number. No one wants to be in debt so introducing something to lessen or prevent this is good.LogicLogic says that an equation must be balanced. Both sides must be equal. The thought that our government is operating outside of this and spending money that we don't have in amounts that they have been is staggering. It's ludicrous, dangerous and it doesn't make sense. Logic tells us that in the equation x-3=0 x must equal 3 but in our equation x equals whatever we want it to be and then we write IOU underneath the answer. A balanced budget amendment is good fiscal policy, it's common sense and it will help to stabilize an uncertain and unstable economic situation. [1] Broke, Glen Beck 2011[2] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com...[3] http://en.wikipedia.org...[4] http://www.princeton.edu...