“No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.”
Phht, just another dead letter.
That basically says they can spend what they appropriate and they have to keep a ledger.
Now, the Founders didn’t really imagine run away deficit spending. Not in my mind did they imagine anyone irresponsible enough to do that.
I do wish we had a balanced budget requirement in the constitution, but IIRC, last year was the first in 7 or 8 that they even put forward a budget at all.
As Betty Boop points out in #56, disaster is going to happen if we don’t come up with a requirement to balance the budget. We cannot forever continue to spend more than our income. All that said, I’m fairly certain that the initial effort by the financiers, once that amendment is in place, will be to extract the same amount of obeisance by forcing interest rates up so that payments on the national debt will bankrupt us.
Short of ‘shoot all the lawyers’, I’m not sure how to fix that. :>)