Republican-backed policies for a constitutional amendment demanding a balanced spending budget and set spending caps sound good in the realm of political rhetoric, but in the real world their results likely would fall short of expectations.

Placing caps on spending isn’t new. Actually, a cap on the amount that the government pays to physicians for Medicaid has been in place for years as a way to manage health care expenditures.

Recently, the Republican-backed legislation put forward proposes spending caps that limit government spending to a smaller percentage of the overall economy over the next ten years. In the proposal, if the cap was exceeded, spending would automatically be cut.

The philosophy behind the idea is sound, however it does not take into consideration members of Congress who don’t want to alienate their base and will look for ways to get around cuts that might hurt their constituents, just as they’ve done with the Medicaid cap.