Tag: Mercatus

Categories
term limits

In the Pudding

Mercatus, map, term limits, Democrats, Republicans

Republicans have made much hay of the Mercatus Center map of our United States, colored by fiscal condition. Why? Well, nine out of the ten least financially stable state governments are run by Democrats.

But there’s another way to look at it.

“Only 15 state legislatures in the U.S. are term limited,” U.S. Term Limits President Philip Blumel writes in a letter to the Mercatus folks. “However, four of your top five fiscally healthy states are term limit states.”

And how many of Mercatus’ bottom five states possess term limits?

Zero.

That’s 80 percent of the top states from a fiscal standpoint coming from just 30 percent of states where legislators are limited. And no state with term limits can be found at the bottom of the heap.*

Now, these impressive results do not prove “that this fiscal outperformance is due primarily to term limits,” Blumel admits. Instead, they do “effectively disprove a common objection to term limits.”

Legislators sans term limits are not “too inexperienced.” Indeed, these state rankings show the suffering, instead, lopsided on the states with no limit on how long legislators can stay in office. 

Blumel points out that term-​limitless Illinois, with the “longest speakership in U.S. history under Mike Madigan,” ended up dead last, fiftieth.

“Legislators in term limit legislatures,” he argues, “have a broader range of experience than in non-​term limited legislatures.” 

Reasonable. 

No extrapolation necessary, however, for the basic conclusion: State government fiscal health correlates strongly with legislative term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Mercatus’ results are no aberration. “We have seen term limit states crowd the top end of the ALEC rankings as well,” notes Mr. Blumel.

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Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Divided We Stand

Politicians like to talk about “unity” and “co-​operation” and “getting things done.”

This would be all well and good if, when they manage to co-​operate, they could restrain themselves from going whole hog and radically increasing government spending.

But the evidence is: They can’t.

Politicians in Washington are most co-​operative and least “obstructionist” when the legislative and executive branches are united by party — that is, the majority’s in Congress is the same as the president’s. But look what happens when there’s united government under one party: Government growth.

A graph compiled by Mercatus Center research fellow Matthew Mitchell makes this easy to see:

Since Eisenhower, the federal government has grown every administration, every year. But the rate of growth is highest when government is united by party. It tends to grow less when there’s divided government. The rate of growth? 2.55 percent with divided government, and nearly double that — 4.67 percent — with united government.

If you look at the graph carefully, you can see there are anomalous developments and periods. And you can see that some famous (Reagan, Clinton-​era) attempts at pruning spending hasn’t amounted to a reduction in total spending, yet. But still, the graph is a bit comforting, when you realize that we have divided government now, after a period of united government and massive spending increases. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies porkbarrel politics too much government

How to Simulate Stimulation

Historians have noticed something interesting about the Great Depression: The bulk of Roosevelt’s New Deal money and effort wasn’t directed at the hardest-​hit states. It was directed at swing states.

FDR’s New Deal could thus be seen as a vast re-​election drive.

Economist Veronique de Rugy, of the Mercatus Center, recently testified before Congress about her studies of recent stimulus spending. She noticed that Democratic districts received bigger bucks than did Republican ones. Coincidence?

Nick Gillespie wrote about this on Reason magazine’s blog, Hit and Run. And, nestled in the comments section, is testimony from someone in the federal government about how stimulus money is actually spent. The government does not look for especially hard-​hit areas. It looks for prospect projects that have been designed and engineered and ready to be funded to reach completion quickly.

This is useful to know. If believed, I’ll leave to you the explanation why Democratic Districts might be further along this pork-​project train than Republican Districts. But it’s worth noting that this method does not really show any targeted expertise on the part of the federal government. It’s just a spend-​and-​spend-​quickly program. Throw out enough dollars and hope something “sticks” … to produce real growth.

You see, this is nothing like how markets for capital projects work in the private sphere. And it’s nothing like a good way of jump-​starting a wounded market economy.

It’s just government-mismanagement-as-usual.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.