Lung Cancer, Heroin, and Government Spending

If this blog was an episode of Jeopardy, the response to the title of this post would be “Name three things that Dan Mitchell doesn’t like.”

But this blog isn’t a game show. It’s a serious forum* for discussing how we protect freedom and prosperity from ever-expanding government.

That’s why, in this interview with John Stossel, I reiterate my mantra that government spending is the problem and that deficits and debt are symptoms of the problem.

I usually use the analogy that government spending is a brain tumor and red ink is the headache caused by the tumor when seeking to help people understand that it’s important to focus on the disease and not the symptom. But to show that I’m not just a single-analogy kind of guy, this time I said that government spending was like lung cancer and that deficits are akin to the resulting cough.

I also concocted an analogy about government goodies being akin to heroin. If you’re an addict, it may feel good to put more junk in your veins, but you’ll be much better off if you endure the short-run discomfort of going clean. Just as it may cause angst among interest groups if we stop the federal gravy train, but they’ll be better off in the long run if we reduce the burden of government spending and restore robust growth.

And nobody will be surprised to see that I made my usual points that there was no risk of default and that it’s actually surprisingly simple to balance the budget with modest spending restraint.

Speaking of analogies, I also modified Senator Durbin’s analogy so that he and his colleagues are a bunch of drug dealers trying to buy votes by addicting people to big government.

*Okay, given all the political humor I share, perhaps it’s a semi-serious forum, but my analysis of fiscal policy is not a joking matter.