Government Shutdown – Make Unbalanced Budgets Illegal

The government was out of control and needed to be shut down. It should remain closed until a balanced budget can be passed, regardless of what’s in that budget, and whether or not Obamacare is funded or not.

Our founding fathers were unable to foresee the abuse that would result in giving congress the ability to borrow money on behalf of the United States. A few simple additions to the constitution to bind the budget to current year revenue and disallow congress to borrow money on behalf of the United States could have prevented our current crisis.

The founding fathers didn’t place restrictions on the budget and borrowing because they had no idea it would be abused in such a way. Our elected representatives have created a national debt and our country is steadily losing wealth.

When congress was given the authority to borrow money in Article 1: Section 8 of the Constitution, the intent of that power was for emergency use only. It was designed to allow us to borrow money to build infrastructure, or in rare circumstances, defend ourselves in war.

Our infrastructure here at home is rapidly deteriorating and our only war on our soil resulted from 9/11. But we spent all of the money we borrowed on killing civilians and our own soldiers halfway across the world instead of securing our borders here.

Our borrowing should have been capped based on our GDP — it was never intended for money to be borrowed to pay the entire budget. This is poor financial planning, something none of us at home could get away with. None of us have the ability to spend more than we make for very long.

In the land of the rich and free our government should be structured in such a way that it has a positive cash flow. It should pay every citizen a dividend each year or lower our taxes. Our goal as a country should be to provide higher quality services for less, just like private business.

Every year our budget should shrink and Americans should be allowed to keep more and more of their money. At some point our government would be so efficient that we’d be able to provide services to other countries, increasing our dividends.

So should the government be shut down?

Absolutely, and it should stay that way until the budget is balanced.

It should be unlawful for congress to pass any unbalanced budget. We cannot keep pushing the problems out to some future date. Our debt is ridiculous, our budget is ridiculous, and now is the time to get it fixed. Our congress needs to take a stand for what they believe in and not give in until the budget is balanced or we have no budget at all.

We cannot continuously borrow money and implement huge plans beyond our budget with the expectations of saving money in the future. This would be a bad move in any business. We should implement small plans we can afford, and use the future savings (if they happen) to make those plans bigger and better.

If you want to help fix this problem, urge your congressman to support a balanced budget amendment that requires congress to have a balanced budget every year.