As Congress has failed to deal with the country’s growing debt, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said it’s up to the states to force Congress to balance the budget.
At a recent conference in Washington, D.C., a bipartisan group of researchers and elected officials gathered at the American Enterprise Institute where they all agreed that when it comes to the nation’s debt, something has got to change - and soon.
As it stands, 28 out of the necessary 34 states have passed resolutions in favor of holding a constitutional convention, following Article V of the Constitution, to consider a balanced budget amendment.
Once two-thirds of state legislatures pass resolutions, Congress would be required to call a convention to consider the constitutional amendment — something progressive groups, including Common Cause, have vowed to fight.
“We’re basically just acknowledging that we’re going to end up having a major crisis on our hands, and we’re close,” DeSantis said at the AEI event last week. “We’ve got a lot of states that want to do this, they need a little bit of prodding sometimes, and the voters need to tell their state representatives that you need to do it.”
“Every day we look and see they’re not solving the problems, and I don’t think ultimately it’ll be solved unless we have a constitutional change where these incentives are effectively on some level imposed on the members of Congress.”
National debt is over $39 trillion
Alex Brill, a senior fellow at AEI studying tax policy and the U.S. economy, said in an interview with the Deseret News that the country’s impending fiscal crisis isn’t a new idea to those who do research in this space, but attention to the seriousness of the problem has increased.
“It’s not something that just happened, or that we just discovered, but there is a shift, I think, in interest in this topic,” he said. “I’m asked about it more often, I hear policymakers talking about it more and saying that they’re hearing about it more often from their constituents.”
The AEI conference included several panels comprised of researchers and lawmakers, including Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the chair of the House Budget Committee, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, former West Virginia Democratic-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin, David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the U.S., and former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.
Nearly all of them agreed that the country is on an unsustainable fiscal path. As of this week, the nation’s total debt is more than $39 trillion.
They also discussed how neither the Republican Party or Democratic Party have been willing to make the difficult changes that are necessary to tackle the debt.
Arrington, a Texas Republican, said while he hopes his party will win the November midterm elections, the effort to address the debt needs to intentionally be bipartisan to “save our country from fiscal calamity, the likes of which we haven’t expressed, even in the Great Depression.”
MacGuineas agreed. She highlighted how important it is to “reinforce some of the bad news” because it’s simply “really bad” right now.
“What’s terrible is that every number you look at in the budget in the fiscal situation right now is in bad shape,” she said.
Where can changes be made?
Panelists shared ideas about how and where the country can make changes to avoid plummeting into a crisis.
Jim Capretta, the Milton Friedman Chair at AEI, noted that 75% of the country’s spending is attached to Medicaid and Social Security. “We’ve overcommitted,” the panelists argued.
John Kasich, the former congressman and governor of Ohio, spoke about the challenges of reining in Medicaid and Medicare spending.
“You think you can fix Medicare and Medicaid without fixing the entire healthcare system? If you want to fix the entire healthcare system, you know who you’re taking on? Hospitals, pharma, trial lawyers,” he said.
28 states have passed constitutional amendment resolutions
Later in the conference, DeSantis and Sununu discussed how 28 states, including Utah, have already passed resolutions calling on Congress to hold a constitutional convention on a balanced budget amendment.
They detailed a dysfunctional Congress and its inability to agree on the matter and how the application process puts bottom-up pressure on lawmakers.
“This is a path, and as far as I can tell, it’s the only path to actually force the guardrails and get these men and women on Capitol Hill to live by the rules that everybody else has to live,” Sununu said.
Kasich agreed. He argued that reforms for spending in various industries like healthcare is a moot point until the public and Congress actually care.
“It’s a waste of time,” he said. “Until you get yourself to the point where the public says we have a problem and you have people that have character, the rest of this is pointless.”
While the panel was designed to educate about the risks of the nation’s debt crisis, Brill said it’s okay if it’s not everyone’s top concern.
“No one should suggest that there’s no concern, there’s no problem at all,” Brill said. “Legislators just need the political will, but we don’t need to actually convince everyone that this is a crisis, we need to just convince enough of them.”
What can be done to slow the rising debt?
Brill acknowledged that there are more elected officials who are acknowledging the problem than before, but it’s still not yet at a point where they are “sufficiently concerned” to act and make policy changes.
“Yes, there’s a lot of people who are concerned about this, both elected officials and then people in the broader policy community, but what’s the right next step to kind of move toward the action that will actually address this problem?” he asked.
The challenge of getting lawmakers to work across the aisle to tackle the debt is getting more challenging, several lawmakers and former lawmakers acknowledged.
Former Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said that not only have Americans lost trust in their government, the three branches have lost trust in one another. After being elected to the Senate in 1978, Baucus said he watched how day by day, bipartisanship eroded and hyper-partisanship took over.
Some solutions were discussed during the conference, including creating a bipartisan commission to examine and propose ideas on how to move forward.
Another is the constitutional amendment as supported by Balanced Budget Now, which is backing the effort to get states to call for a constitutional convention.
“It’s a multi-step process to tackle (it),” Brill said. “We had a debate about what those steps are, and you know, whether it’s straight to action, whether it’s to develop a commission, whether it’s to pursue a constitutional amendment ... I don’t think we solved that problem in an afternoon, but I think we’re working on that.”
MacGuineas noted how some say nothing will truly change until the country hits a crisis point.
She argued that changes could have been made decades ago without Americans feeling much of an impact in their lives, but that’s no longer true and it’s “going to be hard.”
“Regularly you hear people saying, ‘well it’s going to take a crisis,’ and that may well be true, but it really shouldn’t. The fact is, it is all of our jobs to make sure that we don’t (fix) it out of crisis and instead do it this way,” she said.