Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the blog International Liberty , has posted a great video by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explaining why spending caps are the best way to achieve good fiscal results. In addition to the video, narrated by Yamila Feccia (watch below), Dan offers five extra points about government spending control:
- Demographics – Almost all developed nations have major long-run fiscal problems because welfare states will implode because of aging populations and falling birthrates (Ponzi schemes need an ever-growing number of new people to stay afloat).
- Golden Rule – If government spending grows slower than the private sector, that reduces the relative burden of government spending (the underlying disease) and also reduces red ink (the symptom of the underlying disease).
Success Stories – Simply stated, spending caps work. She lists the nations that have achieved very good resultswith multi-year periods of spending restraint. She points out that the U.S. made a lot of fiscal progress when GOPers aggressively fought Obama. And she shares the details about the very successful constitutional spending caps in Hong Kong and Switzerland.- Better than Balanced Budget Amendments or Anti-Deficit Rules – The video explains why policies that try to target red ink are not very effective, mostly because tax revenues are very volatile.
- Even International Bureaucracies Agree – Remarkably, the International Monetary Fund (twice!), the European Central Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (twice!) have acknowledged that spending caps are the most, if not only, effective fiscal rule.
Read more from Dan here, and watch the video below.
