Bruce Bartlett is among my favorite columnists and he writes here about the popular notion among some of us limited government types that the way to put the brakes on runaway government spending is to cut taxes, on the theory that when deficits start to increase, that will make our free-spending politicians curb their ways. Bartlett argues that the theory has been tried and found wanting. Tax cutting, he argues, is not a substitute for measures to reduce government expenditures. He’s right. Republicans (with just a few exceptions) and Democrats (no exceptions) want to continue the great spendathon because they have found that deficits have little political downside.
The true measure of the government’s burden on an economy is its spending — i.e., the extent to which it directs resources away from whatever uses individuals would have chosen and into uses favored by politicians. The more a government spends, the lower the standard of living, and how the state gets the money — through taxation or through borrowing — doesn’t matter. So we can’t starve the beast just by reducing taxes. We have to convince politicians to actually cut spending.
