Author Description

America's recent turmoil over taxes, spending, and debt has exposed a dangerous fiscal situation that has been building for a long, long time. Our country has a long-term debt problem. As if on autopilot, our government continually spends more money than it receives. The deficits between the two are financed by taking out debt. That debt accumulates, and if it gets large enough, America will risk insolvency. "American Solvency" takes a fresh look at the factors underlying our long-term debt problem and proposes a constitutional amendment to resolve those factors. Unlike a balanced budget amendment, this amendment will not merely demand that we balance our budgets. Instead, this amendment will create conditions guiding us to naturally balance our budgets ourselves. It is, for lack of a better term, a Solvency Amendment. The Solvency Amendment will solve our long-term debt problem in a non-partisan and unobjectionable way, by focusing strictly on budgeting procedures and by implementing only a modest change. Nevertheless, it will completely resolve the factors underlying our problem, and will therefore also solve our problem permanently. We will never again be subjected to an existential crisis over our country's finances in which we are forced to rely upon our elected officials to perform superhuman feats of wisdom and political forbearance. Under the Amendment, America's solvency will simply become the natural result of our ordinary political process in action. In this way, with a single constitutional amendment, we can permanently fix much of what is broken in American government.