hich we are headed. People are worried about whether or not we are going to be able to reduce significantly the size of the national debt and our deficits. I do not think there is any debate about that at all.

Madam President, I arrived here in January of 1981. The deficit in that year was about $35 billion, and the national debt was under $1 trillion. That debt had been accumulated over almost 200 years, through a Civil War and two World Wars, the Great Depression, and several smaller depressions.

I was, I believe, the second Member of my side of the aisle to support the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction measure at that time. I thought that was an honest and strong effort statutorily to get our arms around what was then a very small problem by comparison today. Regrettably, that solution did not work, primarily, in my view, because an awful lot of exceptions were created to it.

Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was to apply to, initially, the entire budget. And then, because of the way this institution has run for 200 years and, I suspect, will for as many more years as we are here we began creating exclusion after exclusion. One constituency group after another with major causes came before us and started to peel away the effects of Gramm-Rudman-Hollings so we were incapable of dealing with the budget defi cit.

I then offered a pay-as-you-go budget--I w as in the minority in those days, as I am today. My proposal would have required that every increase in every aspect of the Federal budget had to be paid for it. I got 22 votes for that idea. Had my pay-as-you-go proposal been adopted we could have achieved a balanced budg et by 1 987. We did not, of course.

I strongly urge my colleagues, if they have some time--and I guess they will in the next couple of weeks as we debate this issue--to read David Stockman's book where he described the economic policy decisions of the early 1980's.

I present that, Madam President, as background. I have always supported strong deficit reduction measures, but I believe that a balanced budg et amen dment will not achieve those goals. Adopting a constitutional amendment is t he easy part of this. Clearly the amendment is p opular before you start talking about the cuts it would require. The amendment woul d change the organic law of our country to deal with a contemporary fiscal problem. It would incorporate an economic theory as to how we ought to address our current deficit problem.

I have deep, deep, reservations about it based, first and foremost, on my concern that we ought not allow the organic law of the country to become a place where we deal with contemporary, perplexing problems that we face. I think there is a distinction between the organic law of a nation and a set of statutes and ordinances that allow us to come to terms with those questions.

I am also concerned, Madam President, with the view that somehow by amending the Constitution of the United States a bolt of lightning will strike the Congress and we will depart from our historic pattern of finding the easy way out of problems.

I noticed a moment ago the Senator from Texas was talking about a budget prop osal here a year or two ago that included a tax implication dealing with Social Security, and Democrats were terrible people over here because we did that. There will be an amendment, I g ather, offered that will take Social Security recipients and exclude their benefits from the constitutional amendment to b alance the budget.

I suppose it would not do me any good to offer an amendment that to exclude 6-year-olds, as well. I could make a pretty good case that being a child in America today, based on age and circumstances, is very difficult. I am not trying to minimize the problems that all our seniors face. I simply cannot imagine anyone wanting to write into the Constitution an exclusion for people based on age to avoid the serious fiscal problems we face. Yet, that is an example of what some have proposed we do to the Constitution.