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[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Gattigap
In today's WaPo, Sebastian Mallaby declares dead a Republican bromide that's lasted for a generation: that the best way to shring gov't spending is to cut taxes.

That has become a laughable proposition for anyone who's watched the numbers for the last half-dozen years, but as Mallaby notes, some GOPers continue to hide behind this mantra.

• It's a faith that Rauch [in an article in the Atlantic] traces to the presidential debates of 1980. "John tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes," Ronald Reagan declared in reply to the independent candidate, John Anderson. "Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."
  
  Ever since that debate, the "starve the beast" argument has been a favorite of Republicans. It's an expedient argument, of course, since it justifies the tax cuts that voters are assumed to love. But even the most nakedly cynical politicians need policy fig leaves. "Starve the beast" has allowed tax cutters to feel decent.
  
  Or at least half decent. Everybody knows that the Reagan tax cuts did not actually cause spending to come down in the 1980s; most people have surely noticed that the Bush I and Clinton tax hikes were followed by spending constraint in the 1990s; and the Bush II tax cuts certainly have not stopped Congress from spending like a drunken sailor recently. But then the plural of anecdote is not data, and until the starve-the-beast theory is conclusively discredited, tax cutters won't stop hiding behind it.
  
  Well, now it has been discredited. Rauch cites William Niskanen, an economist who worked in the Reagan White House and now chairs the Cato Institute. Niskanen has crunched the numbers between 1981 and 2005, testing for a relationship between tax cuts and government spending, and controlling for levels of unemployment, since these affect spending and taxes independently. Niskanen's result punctures his own party's dogma. Tax cuts are associated with increases in government spending. The best strategy for forcing cuts in government is actually to raise taxes.

(Niskanen's in-yo-face rejection to tax-cutter conservatives can be found here).

I suppose that some aherents to this faith would reply that Starving the Beast would work just fine if we just got some real fiscal conservatives in office instead of this bunch. This is true, I'm sure, just as it's true that once we get those kinks worked out in those tiny antimatter boots, pigs will indeed be able to fly. The point is, regarless of political theory, this theory doesn't work because actual politicians seem congenitally incapable of following it. Really, how many more real-world examples can we afford?

Mallaby continues:

• But the really interesting question isn't why the starve-the-beast theory is 180 degrees wrong. It's how Republicans will react to this finding.
  
  Just consider the events of last week. On Monday the government reported that Medicare's trust fund would run out of cash in 2018, 12 years earlier than was estimated when Bush came to office. It further reported that Social Security's trust fund would run out in 2040, one year earlier than last year's projection. "The systems are going broke," Bush commented, sagely. "And now is the time to do something about it."
  
  So what exactly did Bush do? He pressed Congress to extend his tax cuts, thus depriving the government of money it might otherwise have used to plug the holes in Medicare and Social Security. In a world with a viable starve-the-beast theory, this might have been okay: Tax cuts could be presented as a way to force the government to cut spending and maybe even to reform entitlements. But if that fig leaf is gone, how can the administration feel decent?
  
  Right on cue, the Senate followed up its agreement to extend tax cuts with a $109 billion spending bill, complete with money to compensate New England shell fishermen for a red-tide outbreak. In the wake of Rauch's Atlantic article, the way the president responds to this sort of egregious spending bill is going to be interesting. Will he have the guts to veto them? Or will he stand like the proverbial emperor, naked in the public square?

Sure, it would be nice to dream of Bush (finally) exercising some underutilized Executive power and vetoing a bill that Congress passes, but I'm betting that our improbable 6-year-run of spending accomodation will continue.

Gattigap

I'm not going to waste time explaining why this shiite is exactly that. This sentence pretty much sums it up:

"The point is, regarless of political theory, this theory doesn't work because actual politicians seem congenitally incapable of following it. Really, how many more real-world examples can we afford?"

Agreed.

But that doesn't ,mean "Starving the Beast" doesn't work. That means politicians are scumbags. That doesn't disprove the soundness of the "starving the beast" theory. If anything it admits the theory would work, if only we didn't have self-interested politicians left to implement it.

This article is also shiite because it provides no alternative. Whats the option to phony conservatives spending like drunken sailors? Electing a bunch of old line bleeding hearts to spend like drunken sailors?