We Can Balance the Budget Again

Balancing the budget is not just good policy, it is a moral obligation to our country—and future generations.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (L) (R-Ga.) shakes hands with President Bill Clinton (R) before the President signed the Balanced Budget Agreement on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Aug. 5, 1997. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

When I became Speaker of the House in 1995, many in Washington considered balancing the federal budget impossible.

However, House Republicans believed that the American people would support balancing the budget and paying down the national debt. In fact, we believed that if they saw a practical doable plan to balance the budget, they would force the Democrats in Congress to go along with the idea. The American people would also convince President Bill Clinton that he had to support a balanced budget if he wanted to be re-elected.

With a lot of hard, determined work and a fair amount of problem-solving and invention, we passed the only four consecutive balanced budgets in the last century. By 1999, then-U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified in the Senate that the Fed thought the national debt would be paid off by 2009—and its economists were studying how to manage the money supply with no federal debt.

The folks who followed us—even the Republicans—did not understand the principles we applied. So, the Congress slipped back into the old habit of deficit spending.

Today, we face a $37 trillion national debt. We are paying more than $1 trillion a year in interest on the debt. Much of the money goes to foreign governments and investors. The interest on the debt is now a bigger cost than the Department of War. This is a real problem.

Everyone agrees: The path to a balanced budget will be complex and require real reforms. We’ve done it before, and it is achievable with the right plan, discipline, and leadership.

Balancing the budget was a function of the principled application of things that worked—and avoidance of things that failed. I recently created a workbook that lays out, step-by-step, how Congress can balance the budget and begin paying down the national debt today. It draws on our lessons learned from the 1990s, proven reforms, and the kind of common-sense discipline every American family understands. Simply put, you can’t spend more than you earn.

To further understand how we got here, and how we can fix it, I encourage you to listen to several of my Newt’s World podcast episodes:

• Episode 878: “Balancing the Federal Budget”
• Episode 562: “Balance the Budget to Save America”
• Episode 359: “Why We Need a Balanced Budget”
• Episode 288: “Outrageous Stories of Government Wasteful Spending”

I also encourage you to read several of my columns that expand on this challenge and opportunity:

• “Balancing the Budget Requires Reforming the Congressional Budget Act”
• “President Trump Challenges the Congress to Balance the Budget”
• “The American People Want a Balanced Budget”

The path forward is not mysterious. It’s practical. We need real reform, honest accounting, and the courage to act. The American people deserve a government that is as responsible with tax dollars as families are with their home budgets.

Balancing the budget is not just good policy, it is a moral obligation to our country—and future generations.

From Gingrich360