The New York Times, August 4, 2011 by Catherine Rampell
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/us/politics/05deficit.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Berkeley&st=nyt
Previous efforts by Congress to bind its own hands have almost always failed. “I’m a skeptic about these kinds of things,” said Alan J. Auerbach, an economics and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “You’re sort of saying, ‘I can’t control myself, so I’m putting in this external mechanism to control myself, but I’m also in control of the external mechanism.'”