National Debt

If you don’t have it, don’t spend it. It seems that congress has a tendency to write laws to spend money that doesn’t exist in the treasury. So, what do they do, they borrow it. The Senate recently passed an eight hundred billion dollar debt limit hike, this will effectively bring the national debt to $8.18 trillion. While this probably had to be done to keep the government running, in the long term, it doesn’t really help. If the money isn’t there, don’t spend it, its that simple.

I would be in favor of a constitutional amendment that would require deficit spending to be approved by a two thirds majority in both houses with a signature from the president and a three quarter majority to override a veto. There might have to be some sort of exception for conflict situations, such as a congressional declaration of war, but other than that, it should be pretty simple.

I’m just one of those people that doesn’t think the role of the federal government is to spend every cent they take in. Right now, it seems that they can’t keep the credit cards put away. If the money isn’t there for some program or agency, we should do without it, that is what the rest of us do. One of the critical “Old Republican” values, fiscal discipline needs to come back.