Balanced Budget Amendment

Much has been said and written about how “easy” a vote for a balanced budget amendment will be--most recently by The Times (editorial, “Happiness Is a Gimmick, May 28). That’s not how the serious lawmakers and economists who once opposed and now support it see this, and no one should believe otherwise. The amendment sets up a process of fiscal discipline that will mean painful choices sooner, rather than later.

The last time the Senate voted on this amendment, in 1986, opponents said all that is lacking to control the deficit is political will, and of course they were right. That year the gross federal debt was a little over $2 trillion. Now, just six years later, it is about to pass the $4-trillion mark, and gross interest ($315 billion in the 1993 budget) is about to become the top spending item for the first time in our history, having passed both defense and Social Security. In the meantime, the political will is still absent, and the stakes for our inaction have risen steeply.

Until we cap the money wasted on interest, we will become increasingly paralyzed into inaction on our most urgent national priorities, from education to infrastructure investments to health care. The lack of an urban agenda so apparent right now in Los Angeles is only the latest example. We simply cannot afford to let the fiscal bleeding continue.

The structural change encompassed in a flexible balanced budget amendment--making sound fiscal policy the general rule, instead of the rare exception--is the only reliable way out of the borrowing binge that has been swallowing our will along with our wallet with mounting vengeance since 1981. To pay our overseas creditors, we can continue to sell off assets like Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center at a faster rate, but that only hides the problems we’re creating for ourselves.

We all can hope and pray for a new era of political leadership to steer us quickly away from our perilous course. But with so much at stake, we will be foolish to put all our trust in that basket.

SEN. PAUL SIMON, D-Ill., Washington