A few weeks back, I had the privilege of co-hosting Granite State Live. GraniteGrok has had a close relationship with the program since its inception, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to co-host. Not for lack of invites, mind you, but logistics and time on my side. Our second guest was John Tamny, author of “Deficit Delusion: Why Everything Left, Right, and Supply-Side Tells You About the National Debt Is Wrong.”
One of the subjects broached was how cutting taxes is great, but only if you then cut government.
It is a common refrain, especially on the right, that cutting taxes can lead to more revenue, not less, but if you were a small-government conservative, why would you ever want the government to have more money?
It also follows that while you might see a hike in revenues initially as people engage in more activity to celebrate the opportunity to invest their own money in the economy rather than have the government take it and try to do it for them, the goal should be to starve the government, not feed it.
After you cut taxes, you need to cut them again, and cut government.
A government that takes in massive sums of revenue will, according to John, continue to accumulate debt because it has a history of collecting vast sums and a projected future of collecting even more.
The debt problem is. by John’s estimation, only solved by making the government a greater risk as a borrowers.
It’s a great interview that takes a very different look at the economics of debt, the government, and the economy. As it happens, New Hampshire’s years of incremental tax cutting have resulted in a declining revenue picture. It’s not catastrophic, but it creates an opportunity.
Suppose we can manage to keep Republican tax cutters in the majority and a Republican in the governor’s chair. In that case, the next budget will be based on lower or at least more modest revenue projections, thanks to lower taxes.
The only responsible thing to do would be to cut the size, scope, and reach of state government. It is a challenge. We haven’t shrunk government since the O’Brien supermajority in 2011-2012. New Hampshire relies overmuch on federal money to pay for things it ought o be paying for and managing itself. This dependency makes the entire situation turbulent, especially when the Federal Government under Trump is attempting to offload the responsibilities by cutting programs that States would then, if they wanted ot maintain them, have to fund at the state or local level.
The elephant in that room is public education funding. School taxes consume a majority of local revenue, making it challenging to fund everything else. Returning decisions and authority down to states, then towns and cities, will require a serious conversation about how much money we waste on an institution that can’t do something as simple as teach a kid to read at grade level.
The Feds need to do less. States ought to be doing less, but that downward pressure invites the opposite, which means cutting state government and deferring any previous authority to towns and cities, places the burden locally, where it belongs, but in the face of an issue no one seems willing or able to address.
Local School budgets are the most significant barrier to it all, and the Education Industrial Complex and the political allies who benefit from this massive laundromat are an intimidating force.
The federal government needs to do less. State governments need to do less. School districts need to do less and spend less, and they could easily do so. Curricula focused on math, reading, writing, critical thinking, civics, and history are what we should be paying for with public oversight and a system that can quickly remedy leadership and teaching issues when students are not meeting even basic standards.
Everything else could be funded separately, privately, as Ian Underwood often suggests in his many arguments about taking things that belong in a community center out of the school model.
None of this just happens. People have to make their case with sound arguments and gather support from voters to change a paradigm that begins like this: The evidence shows that more spending on schools produces worse outcomes.
This is actually true of everything the government does; it therefore follows that you ought to be able to cut budgets all the way up and end up with better results all the way.
