Cut, cap and balance was obviously just a political stunt. Nobody actually meant for it to become law. It would be a total disaster. Government spending automatically increases in recessions because people go on welfare, etc, and taxes automatically go down because people are making less money. The opposite happens during booms. That has a massive evening out effect on the economy. It moves money from the booms to the busts. Cut, cap and balance would force us to do the opposite- cutting spending during recessions and allowing us to increase it only during booms. Not only would it remove the biggest stabilizing factor in our economy, but it would actually make the economy MORE eratic by forcing the government to exagerate the cycles. It's totally crazy. Virtually no economist in the world supported the idea and many, many, of them opposed it in the most strident way... It would have ruined the country permenantly and everybody knows it. It wasn't ever a serious proposal. They just wanted to score some points with voters for pretending to support it.
Even putting aside the economic devestation it would have brought, a supermajority to close a tax loophole, but not to cut somebody's social security benefits? Written into the constitution itself? That's totally indefensible on any level. Plus there were a ton of little things that were obviously just overlooked. For example, social security has $2 trillion saved up, but the way the bill was written they would not be allowed to touch it. That would bring the much hyped up day when the social security system runs out of money up 40 some years for no reason... They didn't intentionally do that, the just didn't bother working out the details because they knew it would never actually become law.