Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Daniel Shaviro (NYU) has an interesting op-ed in today’s New York Times, How Tax Cuts Feed the Beast. Here is the opening:

On the campaign trail, President Bush is busy telling voters that he wants to keep making government “smaller and more efficient” and that his opponent, John Kerry, wants a return to the days of big government. Forget the profligate spending of the past four years, he seems to suggest; instead, think of the many tax cuts that have been pushed through and how in time, as the saying goes, they will “starve the beast.”

But in fact the Bush tax cuts will do nothing of the kind. Counterintuitive though it may seem, they will inevitably end up increasing the size of government.