Our current system of runaway spending is not such a stable order. Yet contemporary lawmaking seems to require willful ignorance of the law of unintended consequences. As a result, many lawmakers, and their pundit-boosters, can't imagine the possible indirect benefits of rule changes. So what, they argue. Congress could pass a balanced budget tomorrow if it really wanted to.
People can vote their representatives out of office if they really want to.
That same failure of imagination makes it hard to see the existing unintended systematic barriers that make it hard to just balance the budget or throw the bums out. But those barriers do exist, and only a rule change can surmount them. And even on a direct level, procedural reforms can have obvious effects. A study in the Atlantic Economic Journal, analyzing data from fiscal year 1991, shows that a line-item veto seems to allow governors to balance budgets more easily. Only one state without a line-item veto had no deficit that year.