The Balanced Budget Amendment appears in these excerpts not as a single proposal under debate but as a recurring reference point for arguments about fiscal rules, constitutional structure, and enforcement. Guests on the program treated it variously as an impossibility under the existing amendment process, as a rule that would be redundant if the government defaulted on its debt, and as a conceptually sound idea whose details determine whether it would work.
The amendment process as obstacle
William Watkins Jr., discussing his book Crossroads for Liberty: Recovering the Anti-Federalist Values of America’s First Constitution, argued that the Constitution’s amendment process is itself the reason a balanced budget amendment has not been adopted. He described the process as one in which the national government controls all amendments that could affect its power, and he distinguished two routes: the never-used convention method, which Congress would call and on which it might set strictures, and the route by which Congress sends an amendment to the states. Of the amendments that have come through the latter route outside the early founding era, he said they typically augment the power of the national government. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Watkins’s proposed remedy was a state-centered amendment process in which the people in the states could propose amendments and ratify them without action by Congress. He said it was a great sadness to him that the amendment process is so nationalistic, and he drew a direct connection to fiscal outcomes: no wonder you are not going to get a balanced budget amendment, and no wonder you are not going to get a rollback of certain federal powers. He placed a change to the amendment process high on his list of things to push for, alongside general education of the people about history and liberty. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Bob Zadek responded skeptically to that solution, observing that it would require House, Senate and President to agree to move forward and that many public officials would perceive themselves as surrendering power. He said he found the greatest hope in the Supreme Court, because one or two changes in the composition of the court in the right direction would produce profound change, and he called Neil Gorsuch a step in the right direction. Watkins agreed that the court has great leverage and that whatever one thinks about Donald Trump, the Gorsuch nomination was a solid, describing Gorsuch as a strong originalist who could fill the seat of a Justice Scalia. Watkins added a concern of his own: a fundamental problem with the court serving as final arbiter of the Constitution and with nine unelected individuals exercising such power, which he said could do much for liberty but also much to destroy and undermine it. He said he would prefer to see the popular branches, where the people have a say, or the state legislatures accountable to the people, more in the process. [[episodes/crossroads_for_liberty__with_william_watkins_jr|Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)]]
Default as an amendment with teeth
David Henderson, discussing deficits with Charlie Deist, described a cliff at which the government would face tough choices: cutting defense spending substantially as a percentage of GDP, reining in the growth of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, or reneging somewhat on the debt, whether partially or totally. He credited his co-author Jeff Hummel with convincing him, while they were writing their article, that the government should default. Henderson summarized Hummel’s argument: taxpayers paying Social Security and income taxes have no say about being taxed, while people who buy federal debt have a say because they did not need to buy those bonds; if cuts must fall on someone, the case for going after the bondholder rather than the taxpayer is a moral one. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019)
Deist asked what a default would do to the government’s credibility in the bond markets, to the interest rates the taxpayer would then be on the hook for, and whether a strategic default would actually produce more fiscal discipline. Henderson answered by quoting a line in their article that Hummel got from the economist David Friedman. Henderson noted that advocates of the balanced budget amendment over the years have wanted the Constitution to require that the government balance the budget, and that what such an amendment needs is teeth—some way of actually enforcing it, which he called very hard to do. Friedman’s line, as Henderson relayed it, was that a government default would be a balanced budget amendment with teeth: who would want to lend to the government after that, and so a debt default would produce more fiscal discipline. David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019)
Rules, commissions and the details
Bob Zadek raised the balanced budget amendment with Jonathan Bydlak at the end of an episode on Afghanistan, after developing an argument about congressional self-interest. He recalled the Base Closure Act, under which Congress, recognizing its own frailty and political inability to close military bases, appointed an independent commission to recommend closures on cost-benefit criteria and then voted the whole list up or down; the commission did its work objectively and apolitically, and the bases were closed. He also recalled the period when Obama and the Hill could not agree on spending and, rather than shut down the government, cut federal spending across the board by the same percentage—which he said was the only time in our history the budget deficit went down, done arbitrarily and across the board. From these he concluded that taking members of Congress off the hook is the only way to reduce spending, and he asked whether anything like that would work and what Bydlak thought about the balanced budget amendment. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Bydlak’s summary was that the rules matter, and that the rules in which members of Congress operate are very important. He said both sides make a mistake in assuming that electing a couple of better people will change things, because members of Congress are political creatures operating within a certain infrastructure. On the amendment itself, he said it conceptually makes a lot of sense, but that in the way it has been proposed on a number of cases the devil really is in the details of how you do it effectively. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Bydlak offered examples of expenditure limits that have worked. He cited Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights as the most effective tax and expenditure limitation that has been enacted, and said it would be fantastic to have something like that at the federal level. He noted unique challenges at the federal level, because such a limit would essentially have to be imposed by a constitutional amendment, which many people are working on but which creates a very high bar. Beyond the states, he pointed to Switzerland and Sweden, saying there is a myth that Sweden is a socialist country but that it actually has stringent expenditure limitations restricting how much its government can pay, implemented in the 1990s when those countries faced the entitlement crisis. Rethinking Afghanistan with Jonathan Bydlak (2020)
Across episodes
The topic recurs in three episodes without a single line of development: Watkins in 2017 treats the amendment as unobtainable because of the amendment process and proposes a state-centered alternative; Henderson in 2019 treats it as a rule lacking enforcement and offers default as the version with teeth; Bydlak in 2020 treats it as conceptually sound but detail-dependent, pointing to Colorado, Switzerland and Sweden. The excerpts show no argument advanced in one episode and answered in another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the text of any proposed balanced budget amendment, the name or number of any bill or joint resolution, or any vote count. They do not say whether the amendment has come to a vote in Congress, nor which amendment to the Constitution, if any, a related case turned on. No excerpt states the date of the Base Closure Act, the years of the across-the-board cuts Zadek recalls, or the founding date of any organization mentioned.