Citizens For Fiscal Responsability

[Gabu]

Whether or not it's a moral responsibility is up for debate, I suppose.  I was referring to legal responsibility, which we had until we tried to get rid of it.  What exactly is so hard to understand about that?

Okay, so we have a legal responsibility due to a constitutional amendment that was passed a while ago.  And?  Are you trying to say that once something is in the Constitution, that's it; we should just go with it and not attempt to change it no matter what?

Of course we have a legal responsibility; that doesn't mean that that's a good thing.

[CheeseWhiz]

When has anyone ever said that you can’t change it?  We just don’t want you to change it.

[Gabu]

When has anyone ever said that you can’t change it?  We just don’t want you to change it.

Bono said that we're trying to evade our responsibility.  I asked what responsibility we had to make a balanced budget and the response I got was a reference to the fact that our Constitution currently mandates that we do so.

Therefore, I guess that, okay, we're trying to evade that responsibility purely by definition, but if that's the "responsibility" we're talking about, it seems to me that to assert that to evade the responsibility is therefore a bad thing is to effectively fall back to legal positivism: "it's a legal responsibility, therefore you're being bad to attempt not to do it".

I simply can't see what's so wrong with letting the Senate appropriate money in what it deems to be the best manner possible instead of applying an essentially arbitrary restriction on what it can and can't do (given that the amendment didn't require a balanced budget, only a "not quite as unbalanced" budget).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don’t see what basis you have to make that claim.

The fact that we only changed our minds on this issue when confronted with the facts of what balancing the budget would require?
And the fact that, so far, the arguements against the switch have either come on ideological grounds or on the extremely dubious idea that the Constitution is somehow sacred and can never and must never be amended.

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I didn't say that. We had a lot of other things to do at the same time.

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We aren't taking a short-cut here. This is a longterm measure.

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I don't think we can actually

[CheeseWhiz]

Article I, Section 8, Clause 6 of the Second Atlasia Constitution:
"The Senate must approve each and every Budget before considering any bill or constitutional amendment. However, the Senate may, by a vote of two-thirds of its number, waive this requirement."

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Article I, Section 8, Clause 6 of the Second Atlasia Constitution:
"The Senate must approve each and every Budget before considering any bill or constitutional amendment. However, the Senate may, by a vote of two-thirds of its number, waive this requirement."

Yes, and we did that. Doesn't say anything about waiving the balanced bit though.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

By waiving the requirement we can then submit a nonbalanced budget, as we have waived the requirement.

Ah... so we read around it to get the result that we want? Just like the real Constitution then...

[CheeseWhiz]

Okay, the argument against striking it is this:
We believe keeping it in the Constitution forces the Senate to consider what we can cut, and how we might be able to balance the budget.  If you for any reason cannot balance the budget, you may get out of it with two thirds of the Senates approval.  All this does, in our opinions, is make it much easier or the Senate to ignore the problem altogether.

Now, why do you support it?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

When you waive a requirement, you are not bound by it.

The requirement that can be waived seems (at a quick glance) to be the requirement to have a budget at all (clause 5). Clause 8 is not mentioned. Looking closer at it, we *could* use it to ignore the balance requirement, but to do so we'd have to leap through more loopholes than I'd feel comfortable about doing.
Besides, 2/3rds isn't an easy number to get; we could end up like Poland in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Now, why do you support it?

Because I don't support a nice choice of slaughtering the economy by forcing through large tax increases at a time when we need consumer spending to rise a lot on the one hand and gutting our ability to defend ourselves as a Nation and making the lives of the poor, the unemployed and the otherwise unfortunate extremely unpleasent, just for the sake of not-quite-getting-very-close-to-balancing-the-budget. Why on earth should getting close to (but *still* failing) to fill up a financial hole (and this isn't always "real" money anyway, but that's a different issue) be placed on a platform far, far above everything else that the federal Government does?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

subject and we acheived it easily.

I don't think we would have done if it was decided that the effect would be to remove the requirement to balance, and not just dely the budget.

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I do see that arguement, but at the same time I have a big problem with reading things in laws that aren't actually there, written down in black and white.

[Sam Spade]

2/3rds is a reasonable number considering the subject and we acheived it easily.  Had there been a severe problem, I would have considered voting in favor of waiving the requirement.  However, not in favor of repealing it completely.

The balanced budget clause pertains to the budget; if we waive the budget requirement we are obviously waiving pertaining clauses.

That's not what it says.  The clause is self-containing.

Please try again. 

[Jake]

The clause merely states that the Senate can postpone consideration of the budget to allow legislation to be introduced instead of solely working on the budget. It says nothing about waving the requirement of a budget, balanced or not.

[CheeseWhiz]

So, why don’t you guys just amend Clause 6 to say what we thought it said?

[Democratic Hawk]

I call upon all to vote against the Amendment to Remove the "Balanced" Budget Requirement, to ensure that the senate stops avoiding its responsabilities.
I welcome all to join me in this cause.

In principle, I agree with the ideal of a balanced budget; however, I voted to oppose it and my reasons for doing so can be found here:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=32541.15

Dave