With the exception of 2010-2014, when the Tea Party briefly had a grip on the Republican Party, the burden of government spending has been increasing in the United States.
This unfortunate trend can’t continue indefinitely, so sooner or later we’ll reach a point where politicians will feel pressured to address growing fiscal imbalances.
The crowd in Washington will want some sort of “budget summit,” which – if history is any guide – means that the senior lawmakers who created the problem go behind closed doors to craft a deal involving real tax increases and fake spending cuts.
Unsurprisingly, that approach doesn’t work. At best, the tax hike is a substitute for much-needed spending restraint. And in many cases, politicians treat the expectation of higher revenues as an excuse to increase outlays.
This isn’t just the pattern in the United States. Politicians all over the world have been raising taxes, yet debt levels continue to climb.
The right solution, indeed the only solution, is spending restraint. Which is the lesson Steve Davies expounds upon in this video for Learn Liberty.
Every single example Steve cites is supported by strong evidence.
Indeed, I’ve written about each and every nation he mentions.
What makes this debate so frustrating is that all the evidence is on the side of spending restraint.
It’s not just academic scholars who have shown that fiscal consolidations based on spending restraint are far more successful. Even left-leaning bureaucracies have admitted that spending control
is the only approach that produces good results.
I’ve shown how limiting the growth of spending is the sensible way to reduce the fiscal burden of government and control red ink. And when I share this table during debates, I always ask my friends on the left to show their collection of nations that got good results with tax increases.
They’ve never answered my challenge.
Not once.
The bottom line is that we know that the Golden Rule of spending restraint is good for growth, and we know spending restraint is the way to reduce red ink.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that politicians have a “public choice” incentive to instead raise taxes. That game doesn’t end well.
[…] resources from the productive sector of the economy, regardless of how it is financed. There is real-world evidence that large public sectors sap the private sector’s vitality, augmented by lots of academic […]
Top-GUN
Agreed. But Discretionary spending is still $1.1T. I’d call that a big one. Let’s deal with one problem at a time. If you’ve read my posts, I’ve dealt with Social Security elsewhere.
Fixing SS is part of my tax code fix.
Ned,,, discretionary spending is a problem,,, but not the big one…
The big one is all that UnConstitutional entitlement spending no one wants to address,,, that is growing exponentially,,, and far exceeds discretionary spending,, in fact 2x+
spending restraint is not possible when politicians can become billionaires once they leave office… this happens largely based on the amount of money they spent while in office… and exactly who benefited from that spending… according to fox news… the “Obama” brand is poised to become a billion-dollar item… what exactly did Obama do while he was in office to add all of that value to his family name? and who is willing to pay that kind of money to suck up to the Obama Klan? Obama spent piles and piles of TAXPAYER money… he and that miscreant congress spent money that won’t be earned for decades… your grandchildren will be working their little tushes off to pay for the Obama/Bush era profligate spending… the only way to stop these little flowers from turning the U.S. into Greece is a SPENDING CAP… add TERM LIMITS… and we can begin to right the ship of state… now…………… how do we do that?
“The Obamas are on their way to becoming a billion-dollar brand”
By Alex Pappas | Fox News
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/the-obamas-are-on-their-way-to-becoming-a-billion-dollar-brand
The benefits for budget cuts are non-existent for legislators. The benefits for spending increases are many.
Legislators should be compensated for budget restraint.
Let’s start with Discretionary Spending, which is about $1.1T.
If you gave legislators a 2x salary bonus for staying under 1% increase adjusted for inflation, it would cost you $250 M. That’s a huge carrot for those asses in Congress.
Would you spend that, to keep Discretionary Spending increases to less than $11B?