Tweet [1]
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy calls for a reduction in government spending [2]. A slice:
Enter the new paper by Cogan, Heil and Taylor, which finds that, when faced with an inevitable debt explosion in our future, the only viable and desirable option is for Uncle Sam to limit expenditures as a share of GDP, around the 20% ratio that prevailed before the pandemic. The authors find that this approach avoids the “potentially large increase in future federal taxes.” Better yet, they actually find that the policy would boost both short- and long-term GDP.
Richard Ebeling reminds us that Joe Biden’s passions are mostly for more power [3].
Here’s David Henderson on the Wall Street Journal on the state of Georgia’s response to covid. [5]
David Boaz writes about women’s rights [6].
Jeff Jacoby is understandably disturbed by the Trumpification of the Republican party [7]. Here’s his conclusion:
Unquestioning support for the supreme leader is not a democratic value, as Republicans emphasized just four years ago. In its 2016 platform, the Republican National Committee blasted Barack Obama and the Democrats for having “changed what John Adams called ‘a government of laws and not of men’ into just the opposite.” This year there is no platform. There is only a resolution “enthusiastically” and “unanimously” endorsing whatever Trump wants. What would John Adams have called that?