Best Day Ever for a Reminder of How Mainstream a Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment Is

With Clay Pell Jr. announcing his 2014 campaign for Governor of Rhode Island on the same day that President Barack Obama will be delivering his 2014 state of the Union message, this may be the best day ever to remind people that Mr. Pell’s grandfather and Democratic Party legend, Senator Claiborne Pell, voted for a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution, motivated by fiscal circumstances milder than those faced by the country now…

Today, annual deficits run-up by the Federal government are much larger than the figure of $221 billion cited by Senator Pell in his explanation of his vote in favor of the 1986 balanced budget amendment. 2011 will be the third year in a row where the Federal deficit exceeds $1 trillion dollars, with no return to 1986 levels anticipated (in inflation adjusted dollars) in the next five years projected by the Office of Management and Budget.

By 1994, Senator Pell believed that the projected lowering of annual deficits to 2.3% of GDP made a balanced budget amendment unnecessary, but today, deficits are much larger than 2.3% of GDP and are larger as a percentage of GDP than they were when Senator Pell voted to send a balanced budget amendment to the states…

Believe it or not, the balanced budget amendment tradition is still alive and well in Rhode Island’s Congressional delegation. In 2011, Rhode Island Congressmen David Cicilline and James Langevin both co-sponsored  a balanced budget amendment, similar to the one voted for by Senator Pell (though containing some different exceptions for when it is to be applied, and a few more items excluded from the definition of balance), although neither Congressman has signed on to a similar amendment, with multiple Democratic sponsors, introduced in the 2013 Congressional session.

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