I once believed, like Milton Friedman, that among the most effective tools for reining in excessive government growth is to “starve the beast” – that is, to keep tax revenues as low as possible. Starved of tax revenues, big government would have no choice but to shrink into smaller government, one that can survive on appropriately small sums of revenue.
I no longer believe that this theory of “starving the beast” is correct. It’s now obvious to me that as long as the government can finance its current expenditures with borrowed funds, a policy of refusing to allow taxes to be raised in order to meet expenditures doesn’t starve the beast; that policy engorges the beast.
The reason the government is engorged when tax revenues are kept below expenditures is that, as a result of this policy, much of current government spending is paid for by future taxpayers-citizens. The debt that the government issues to fund current expenditures comes due in the future, when many of today’s taxpayers-citizens will either be in lower tax brackets or their graves. The burden of repaying this debt falls on many people who aren’t even born when the debt-financed expenditures are made. The bottom line is that deficit financing allows today’s taxpayers-citizens to get goodies from the government and then shove the bill for these goodies onto tomorrow’s taxpayers-citizens.
Because deficit financing allows today’s taxpayers-citizens to spend other people’s money – and because no person spends other people’s money as carefully as that person spends his or her own money – the demand for government ‘services’ today is higher than it would be if today’s taxpayers-citizens were obliged to pay for all the government they demand. Just as, say, people in New York and California will demand more government services if those services will be paid for largely by people in Florida and Texas, people in 2026 will demand more government services if those services will be paid for largely by people in 2056.
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The beast of big government is far more likely to be starved, or at least kept on a leaner diet, by a strict budgetary rule that requires that all current expenditures be funded with current revenues – revenues gotten either from current taxes, from cuts in government spending on particular programs, or from sales of public lands or other government-owned assets. Were taxpayers-citizens obliged to pay today for what they consume through government action today, they’d be much more likely to resist increases in government spending.
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