Is a balanced budget amendment a good idea?

PROVO — Republicans in the House and Senate are preparing constitutional amendments that would require the government to run a balanced budget every year. Politically, the lines are already drawn, with Republicans generally in favor and Democrats generally opposed. But does balancing the federal budget each year make economic sense? Like many issues in economics, the answer is, "it depends." Specifically, it depends on the time horizon over which we balance.

One way to gain some insight into how the government should act is to imagine the parallel with your own household budget. The parallel is not perfect, because the government is big enough to affect the whole economy while your household (even if you are Bill Gates) is not. Nonetheless, the analogy is useful.

So, should you run a balanced budget as a household? The obvious answer is, of course you should. In fact, you really aren't given much of a choice in the matter, at least in the long run. If you spend more than you earn over a long period of time you will go into debt. And if you fail to pay that debt, your creditors will start seizing your assets. You might get out of paying back the full amount by declaring bankruptcy, but that's not a good choice when making a personal financial plan.

A more subtle question is, over what time horizon should you balance your budget? Should it be a year? Clearly you don't balance it over short periods of time, like a day. Most of us get paid relatively infrequently. If we adopted a strict balanced budget rule, we would spend our paycheck in full each payday. On days when we didn't get paid we would not be able to spend anything. Clearly a day-to-day balanced budget is silly for most of us. In practice, we set aside most of our paycheck on payday and gradually spend this balance down until the next one arrives.

Financial planners tell us to set some of our income aside each payday and save. One reason for saving is to be prepared for an unexpected expense. In many cases we can't really avoid running a household deficit. If the transmission goes out on the car, it is usually necessary to repair it or replace the car, even if this exceeds the planned budget for the month. We can dip into savings to do this or borrow money, but either way we are running a budget deficit.

Running this kind of deficit is not such a bad idea if we have the self-discipline to run surpluses later. That is, we either repay our loan or rebuild our savings account to its original level by spending less than our income.