1992 newspaper clipping:

Let's play a little game:  Let's pretend that you readers are our elected federal leaders and you wish to do something about the deficit.  Bear in mind that you have the power to balance the budget.  You have ALWAYS had the power to balance the budget.  Legally, nobody can stop you from balancing the budget.

Our leaders are not balancing the budget.  Instead, they just finished spending weeks and weeks debating a constitutional amendment requiring themselves to balance the budget at some uncertain point in the future.  President Bush, who has never submitted a balanced budget, was all for this plan.  So was most of Congress, which this year will emit a budget with the largest deficit ever.

In other words, our leaders are like a doctor who finds a knifing victim lying in the street, bleeding to death, so the doctor opens his medical bag, takes out a scalpel, stabs the victim a few hundred more times, then writes himself a stern note that says:  "BETTER DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS BLEEDING!  BY 1997 AT THE LATEST!"  Then he goes and builds a Dairy Queen in space.