Orrin Hatch: “Let me finish. If there is a minor or negligible drop below balance at the end of the year, and we find out that has…”

“Let me finish. If there is a minor or negligible drop below balance at the end of the year, and we find out that has occurred after the fiscal year has ended, we can avoid constitutional problems for minor deviations. However, we still have an incentive to get the budget back in line because section 2's debt ceiling provision does not rely on estimates. That is where the distinguished Senator is missing the point of this amendment. Section 2 does not rely on estimates. It requires that we not increase the debt without a three-fifths vote, and to avoid hitting the debt ceiling we have every incentive to stay at or above balance and to ensure that small deviations are actually made up. All of this is substantially better than the current system, which is not working. The current system is where we make our estimates and then we immediately forget about them and pass whatever legislation we want to, and that is why they are always out of balance. It has given us 28 straight years of unbalanced budgets, and deficits for 58 of the last 66 years--enough to drive anybody who is fiscally responsible wild. To argue that this current way of doing things is better than having fiscal discipline written into the Constitution, I think completely misses the point. Senate Joint Resolution 1 is a necessary step to give us the incentives to do something about this mess of unbalanced budgets that are going to continue unless we have something like this.”