{"id":12437,"date":"2007-08-04T17:30:12","date_gmt":"2007-08-04T21:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12437.html"},"modified":"2007-08-04T17:30:12","modified_gmt":"2007-08-04T21:30:12","slug":"give-up-on-the-bba-mr-richardson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/give-up-on-the-bba-mr-richardson\/","title":{"rendered":"Give up on the BBA, Mr. Richardson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally, presidential candidates are going to embrace bad, unpopular ideas. That’s to be expected, I suppose; no candidate is going to get every issue exactly right.<\/p>\n

But Bill Richardson’s support for a Balanced Budget Amendment is just bizarre. He not only supports a bad policy, but he brags<\/i> about it, as if he assumes others are going to agree with him.<\/p>\n

Apparently, the New Mexico governor touted<\/a> his BBA policy at YearlyKos this afternoon.<\/p>\n

Oh, man. Bill Richardson just repeated his call for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the constitution. The audience, showing what I think is a pretty impressive level of knowledge of budget policy, erupted in boos. And rightly so. This is a terrible<\/i> idea. Fortunately, Richardson’s not going to be president, but imagine if we’d had such a thing in place during, say, the second world war. I dunno what Richardson thinks he’s doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Richardson didn’t slip up and accidentally mention this today; he frequently plugs his support for a constitutional amendment on this on the stump, and emphasizes his position in interviews<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to imagine what Richardson hopes to accomplish by endorsing such a remarkably bad idea. Occasionally, deficit spending is absolutely necessary to the health of the economy. Indeed, during a recession or a war, deficits are practically essential.<\/p>\n

The BBA is a rather cheap gimmick and an awful policy, which is why the audience was less than receptive today. The sooner Richardson drops the proposal from his repertoire, the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Occasionally, presidential candidates are going to embrace bad, unpopular ideas. That’s to be expected, I suppose; no candidate is going to get every issue exactly right. But Bill Richardson’s support for a Balanced Budget Amendment is just bizarre. He not only supports a bad policy, but he brags about it, as if he assumes others […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}