Deficit attention disorder: its opponents make the case for the Balanced Budget Amendment.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

So rich is the nonsense oozing from America's public forum on the Balanced Budget Amendment that you're gonna need some beta blockers if you've been paying any attention whatsoever. All the hucksterism lining up against the measure powerfully recommends it, of course. While it's difficult to see how the BBA could constrain these resourceful spenders and taxers, the public flogging of the proposal has restored my faith.

The BBA is not perfectly crafted, nor will it miraculously "fix" the federal government's compulsive gorging, nor will the court battles over what constitutes "balance" be less than hideous. Yet the champions of government, both liberal and conservative, are homing. I like that in a constitutional law.

Start with this: The system is hemorrhaging red. In fiscal 1996 the federal government spent $344 billion on interest servicing the national debt, 24 percent of total federal taxes paid! Federal budgets have been in deficit for 29 straight years. If the BBA erects but a speed bump on the federal government's joyride to fiscal damnation, then let the constitutional games begin.

The liberals crow that we need deficits to stimulate the economy in times of recession. Nice try with the mouth-to-mouth on Keynesian demand management. But since the "stagflation" of the 1970s (when fiscal policy and monetary expansionism cleverly combined to deliver negative growth effects), John Maynard Keynes has been as dead as Elvis.

On the other hand, conservative critics such as Robert Bork and Charles Fried detest the Supremes so much (perhaps because they ain't one?) that any court-enforced constraint on the duly elected branch of government is branded a tyrannical usurpation of the people's power. That's what a constitution is all about: checking democracy. The central question is, Can legislators act responsibly without a balanced budget requirement? One need not even serve up the appalling Sen. Bob Torricelli (D-N.J.), a hustler whose multi-million-dollar campaign - fully endorsed by his predecessor Bill Bradley, the Mother Teresa of American politics - had scarcely dimmed its TV spots touting his unwavering support for the BBA before he rose to cast the deciding ballot defeating it. The answers supplied by Our President are the ones dancing on the cutting edge.

The administration's argument is that we don't need a BBA: Let's just roll up our sleeves and get it done. "Balancing the budget only requires Congress's vote and my signature,"...