[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 42 (Tuesday, March 7, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3636-S3637]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

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                    BUDGET AMENDMENT'S TIME HAS COME

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, there was of a variety of comment 
before the vote on the balanced budget amendment, one of the more 
sensible appearing in the Buffalo News, written by Douglas Turner.
  I ask that the column be printed in the Record.
  The column follows:

                 [From the Buffalo News, Feb. 27, 1995]

 Budget Amendment's Time Has Come; The Democrats Are Mortgaging Their 
                         Future by Opposing It

                          (By Douglas Turner)

       Washington.--Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted on 
     Friday that the Senate will defeat a proposed amendment to 
     the Constitution calling for a balanced federal budget.
       If he's right, and the learned New York Democrat quite 
     often is, that Senate action will squelch the bill that 
     easily passed the House last month.
       The crucial Senate vote will probably come Wednesday or 
     Thursday.
       Loss of the amendment will not be good for the country. 
     Fighting this idea whose time has come will also be a 
     calamitous loser for the Democrats. They won't get the Senate 
     back in 1996 or 1998 if they win on this week's roll call.
       It guarantees returning the Republicans to control of the 
     House after next year's elections.
       House GOP Campaign chairman Bill Paxon will say a bigger 
     Republican majority is needed to offer up this amendment 
     again.
       If the amendment fails, the states will be denied their 
     opportunity to vote on the measure. This will insult our 
     embattled federal system. Belief in our national system is 
     already under heavy attack from junkyard dog conservatives.
       Defeat will be the same as Washington Democrats saying to 
     the nation: ``We know you have a legal right to consider this 
     popular idea, but we don't trust you, not even your 
     sophisticated state legislatures, enough for you to consider 
     it.'' Dumb.
       ``Popular'' doesn't describe the momentum behind the 
     balanced budget idea. Eighty percent of the nation wants this
      amendment. Even in liberal New York State, support is 
     overwhelming.
       Moynihan is one of the Democrats who does believe voters 
     are smart enough to understand. He has spent days, weeks, 
     honing and delivering his arguments against the amendment. 
     He's published a small booklet about it, and gave a lengthy 
     floor address last week. He talked about it on ``Meet the 
     Press'' again yesterday.
       Central to their arguments, and Moynihan's, is their 
     concern for loss of flexibility. The amendment, they say, 
     will deprive Congress of the ability to infuse a sinking 
     economy with enough federal money to restore its vigor.
       We'd be inviting a sustained economic Depression, they say. 
     Moynihan devised a chart that shows the big spikes in the 
     national economy before 1940. These show crippling variations 
     in gross national product, up and down by as much as 15 
     percent in the span of a couple of years.
       Post-1940 variations are mild, and generally positive, on 
     this chart. These came after the massive New Deal expansion 
     of the government bureaucracy and the practice of ``counter-
     cyclical'' federal spending.
       The chart is an icon to a generation of politicians and 
     professors steeped in the Keynesian tradition of demand 
     economics.
       The chart looks good until you think about it. First, it 
     credits special surges in federal spending for the relative 
     stability of the post-war economy. But it ignores the role of 
     such income support programs as Social Security, and the 
     importance of the labor movement as post-war stabilizers.
       It also ignores the fact that the most celebrated 
     ``counter-cyclical'' spending (not 
      [[Page S3637]] counting defense) was during the New Deal. It 
     did build many fine projects, and it helped hundreds of 
     thousands of individuals. It had little if any lasting effect 
     on the economy as a whole.
       The last counter-cyclical experience occurred during the 
     recession of 1982-83. To help the unemployed and help 
     stimulate a flat economy Congress threw a few billion into 
     public works and expanded unemployment benefits.
       There is nothing in this proposed amendment that would bar 
     Congress from taking such modest steps again. If a crisis 
     like the Depression occurred again, a three-fifths majority 
     in each house could bypass the amendment's spending 
     restrictions.
       If there were a crisis, the people would respond just as 
     they did in the 1930s. They threw out a catatonic GOP and 
     installed Democrats, giving them a three-to-one margin.
       The Democrats are on the wrong side of this one. Balancing 
     the budget is a liberal concept, in the classic sense of the 
     word, liberating.
       Interest on the debt nearly equals all the government 
     spends on discretionary programs, such as disease control, 
     transit, research, aid to cities, education and foster care.
       Interest payments are crowding out aid to the 
     underprivileged just as much as entitlements. Interest 
     payments go to people rich enough to buy government 
     securities in $10,000 and $100,000 lots--not exactly the guy 
     in your neighborhood Legion hall.
       It is a loser for the Democrats on demographic lines. It is 
     the young voter--not the aging one--that is going to pay and 
     pay and pay to get this debt off his back.
       For every sophisticated argument against it, there is an 
     even stronger common sense argument for balancing the 
     budget--sooner than later.
       The people aren't dumb.
       

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