In September 1787, when asked what kind of government America would have, Benjamin Franklin famously answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” As America approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, federal officials have lost the ability to budget responsibly. Can we keep a republic that has forgotten how to budget?
Kurt Couchman’s Fiscal Democracy in America: How a Balanced Budget Amendment Can Restore Sound Governance offers some possibilities. Couchman’s book is a serious contribution to the debate over debt, congressional dysfunction, and constitutional reform. His subject is a balanced budget amendment, but the book’s deeper concern is Congress itself. The federal budget process no longer disciplines tradeoffs, reveals costs, or gives most legislators meaningful responsibility for governing.
Budgeting as the Core Function of Congress
Couchman begins from a sound institutional premise. Budgeting is at the center of governing. Through the budget, elected representatives decide what the federal government will do, how much it will do, and how those activities will be financed. When budgeting breaks down, the damage is not limited to deficits or debt. Bad budgeting weakens Congress, empowers the executive branch, conceals tradeoffs, rewards special interests, and allows current officeholders to transfer costs to future taxpayers.
That framing gives the book more force than a conventional argument for fiscal restraint. Couchman does not present a balanced budget amendment as a partisan weapon, a slogan, or a shortcut to smaller government. He presents it as a constitutional commitment device. Ordinary budget statutes are too easy to waive, ignore, or rewrite. A constitutional rule would elevate balance as a governing norm and raise the political cost of evasion.
The book’s strongest argument rests on incentives. Legislators face steady pressure to approve spending, preserve tax preferences, and avoid the immediate pain of offsetting those choices. Organized interests press for concentrated benefits. The costs are diffused across taxpayers or shifted into the future through borrowing. Persistent deficits create fiscal illusion, making government appear cheaper than it is. Couchman’s balanced budget amendment is designed to reconnect benefits with costs.
His proposed amendment is deliberately spare. Expenditures and receipts must be balanced, though balance may occur over more than one year. Debt service and borrowing are excluded from the relevant definitions. Congress would have ten years after ratification to achieve balance. Emergency departures would require two-thirds approval in both houses, and debts incurred for emergencies would have to be repaid as soon as practicable.
That design reflects one of the book’s major strengths. Couchman understands why earlier balanced budget amendments failed. Annual balance would be too rigid, partisan supermajority rules would be politically fragile, and program exclusions would invite evasion. Couchman’s alternative is a neutral constitutional principle that Congress can implement through statute.
The phrase “principles-based” matters. Couchman’s amendment would not dictate the size of government or settle fights over taxes, entitlements, defense, or federalism. Those choices would remain political. Instead, the amendment would require that such arguments occur within a framework that forces members of Congress to acknowledge tradeoffs.
This is why the book should be read as fiscal institutionalism, not merely as a BBA brief. Couchman is trying to rebuild the operating system of federal budgeting. The constitutional rule is the anchor, but it depends on statutory complements. These include budget targets, credible enforcement, better treatment of emergencies, improved timing, automatic continuing appropriations, and a more comprehensive congressional budget process.
Rebuilding the Budget’s Institutional Foundation
Before reading Fiscal Democracy, I had read Couchman’s 2021 predecessor paper, Unified Budgets Can Help Revive Congress, which adds useful context. The unified budget proposal responds to Congress’s procedural failure. Couchman would put all spending and revenue in the same annual budget bill. Lawmakers would have to debate discretionary appropriations, mandatory spending, and tax expenditures in one fiscal forum.
That idea strengthens the book’s central claim. A balanced budget amendment without a functioning budget process would risk frustration, evasion, or symbolic compliance. Congress cannot balance the budget responsibly if most of the budget runs on autopilot and most members have little role in setting priorities. Unified budgeting would force lawmakers to compare programs, tax provisions, and spending categories against one another. It would make tradeoffs harder to avoid and easier for voters to understand.
It would also change incentives facing unelected officials. Agencies, trust funds, government corporations, and quasi-public entities operate within institutional settings that reward mission creep, budget growth, personnel expansion, and discretionary authority. Fragmented budgeting strengthens those incentives by allowing each program or entity to defend its activities apart from the broader fiscal tradeoffs. Unified budgeting would not eliminate bureaucratic self-interest, but it would make administrative government more visible by requiring those claims to compete in a single fiscal forum.
Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, discussed in the book, offers a useful test case for Couchman’s framework. TABOR constrains revenue and expenditures but does not stop the growth of government by other means. Exemptions, federal funds, public enterprises, user fees, unfunded liabilities, and regulatory expansion. Fiscal rules can matter, but they must be paired with comprehensive budgeting and regulatory discipline.
David Hebert’s critique of balanced budget requirements sharpens the same point. Budget numbers are constructed through baselines, scores, accounting rules, timing conventions, and classifications. A rule requiring expenditures and receipts to match does not automatically constrain the underlying fiscal reality if lawmakers can redefine, delay, or reallocate the relevant costs.
This is the main challenge to Couchman’s project. A fiscal rule is only as strong as its definitions, measurement conventions, and enforcement mechanisms. Judicial enforcement offers no easy answer. Courts are poorly suited to managing federal budgeting, and judicial control over fiscal policy could create its own constitutional problems. Couchman’s more plausible path is political and congressional enforcement, supported by implementing legislation and public accountability. That may be the right answer, but it leaves a persistent difficulty: Congress would still be policing itself.
Couchman’s best answer is that the amendment is only one part of a larger institutional package. A constitutional rule can set the norm. Unified budgeting can widen the budget’s field of vision. Together, those reforms could make evasion more visible and politically costly.
Chronic deficits are failures of consent across time. Current voters and officeholders authorize benefits that future taxpayers must finance. Some borrowing is defensible, but structural deficits allow the political class to promise government without admitting what government costs.
The book also has a broader constitutional theme: Congress must reclaim responsibility. When Congress fails to budget, power migrates elsewhere. The executive branch gains discretion, leaders substitute closed-door deals for committee work, and rank-and-file members lose the ability to represent their constituents in meaningful budget choices.
The book’s value lies in insisting that budgetary choices must be made openly, repeatedly, and under rules that prevent indefinite postponement. Couchman’s contribution is to take that institutional problem seriously and to propose a constitutional rule embedded in a broader reform architecture.
Fiscal Democracy in America is a serious defense of a principles-based balanced budget amendment and of rebuilding Congress’s capacity to govern. Whether the proposal succeeds depends less on the phrase “balanced budget” than on the institutional machinery built around it.
