Budget

As expected, the House voted this afternoon on a balanced budget constitutional amendment, H.J. Res. 2. The good news: it failed, 261 to 165. (A constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority to pass.) If you’re wondering why it’s so great that the House rejected an amendment that would require a balanced budget, check out my recent blog post with the top five reasons why the BBA is such a terrible idea. In short, approval of a BBA in the House would have brought us one big step closer to longer and deeper recessions, with major cuts to programs that women and their families depend on. Read more »

The House plans to vote tomorrow or Friday on H.J. Res. 2, a balanced budget constitutional amendment (BBA) sponsored by Rep. Goodlatte (R-VA).  The amendment is not new – it nearly came to the House floor over the summer, and similar amendments have been proposed many times over the years, especially in the 1990s.  But amending the Constitution to require the federal government to balance its budget every year was a terrible idea then, and it’s a terrible idea today. 

So terrible that a group of more than 1,000 economists, including 11 Nobel laureates, issued a joint statement in 1997 that said, “We condemn the proposed ‘balanced-budget’ amendment to the federal Constitution.  It is unsound and unnecessary…[and] mandates perverse actions in the fact of recessions.”

So terrible that five winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics issued a statement  in July opposing a BBA because of the negative effect it would have on an already troubled economy.

So terrible that Macroeconomic Advisers, a private economic forecasting firm, recently concluded that if a BBA had been ratified and were now being enforced for fiscal year 2012, “the effect on the economy would be catastrophic” and “recessions would be deeper and longer.”  According to the report, if the budget were balanced through spending cuts in 2012, about 15 million more people would lose their jobs and the unemployment rate would double (from 9 percent to a staggering 18 percent).  

Still not convinced?  Here’s a recap of my top five reasons why the House should reject the BBA:  Read more »

Did you know that over 904,000 children were served by Head Start in 2009? Or that college graduation rates for women have increased by over twenty percentage points between 1970 and 2009 but that nearly 13 percent of women still don’t graduate from high school? Or that, despite working full-time, year-round, 1,168,000 women still lived in poverty in 2008?

All of this information can be found from the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States. Read more »