Budgetary reform and formal modeling : A comment on Gabel

In a recent article, Gabel and Hager argue that the line-item veto and the balanced budget amendment (BBA) promote and may increase pork-barrel spending. In their discussion of the balanced budget amendment, Gabel and Hager present one example to support their claim. I demonstrate that the effect of a BBA in their model is highly contingent on parameter values, and that their results hold only for a specific set of parameter values. Further, in a generalized model where the balanced budget amendment is crafted endogenously, the BBA that is enacted has the effect of either decreasing spending or keeping it constant.