A balanced federal budget sounds like a good thing. Certainly we were well on our way in that direction when George H.W. Bush entered the White House.
But during his tenure, we had a vice president, Dan Quayle, who said that Ronald Reagan had “proved deficits don’t matter.” Under the Bush administration, the national debt grew by $4 trillion.
Under present conditions, if the so-called Balanced Budget Amendment had become law, according to a report by Macroeconomic Advisors — a nationally known economic consulting firm — the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts the amendment would authorize, in 2012 alone, would have resulted in the loss of 15 million more jobs nationally, doubling the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent.
This would have caused the over-all economy to shrink by about 17 percent. “The effect on the economy would be catastrophic,” the report concluded.
