International Evidence Shows Spending Restraint Is Best Way to Address Red Ink

Tyler Cowen's recent New York Times column explains how nations as diverse as Ireland, Sweden, and Canada have successfully solved fiscal problems by limiting the growth of government spending:

America's long-run fiscal outlook is bleak, mostly because of an aging population and rising health care costs. To close the gap between expenditures and revenue, ...we’ll need to focus especially on reducing spending, largely because that taxes on the wealthy can be raised only so high. ...Higher income tax rates would discourage hard work and encourage tax avoidance, thereby defeating the purpose of the tax increases. ...Higher levels of government spending and taxation would also soak up resources that might otherwise foster innovation and new businesses. And sentiment would most likely turn ever stronger against those immigrants who consume public services and make the deficit higher in the short run. ...The macroeconomic evidence also suggests the wisdom of emphasizing spending cuts. In a recent paper, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, economics professors at Harvard, found that in developed countries, spending cuts were the key to successful fiscal adjustments — and were generally better for the economy than tax increases. ...The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed. Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997.

Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XVII

Finally, some good news to report! Ireland may be in a recession (caused in large part by misguided housing subsidies), but there are two things worth admiring about the Emerald Isle's public policy. Many wonks already know about the first policy, the 12.5 percent corporate tax rate that helped transform Ireland from the "sick man of Europe." But it seems that Irish policymakers are reading Chris Edwards, because the second admirable policy is that lawmakers actually cut civil service compensation by 13.5 percent. And these are real cuts, not the type of phony gimmick you find in Washington, where something is called a "cut" simply because it didn't increase as fast as previously planned. A columnist writing in the UK-based Times wonders why Irish bureaucrats did not go nuts with public protests and speculates that maybe they actually understand that they have a sweetheart deal compared to their brethren in the productive sector of the economy:

Because of the budget deficit, shrinking economy and untenable level of national debt, all public service salaries will be cut by an average of 13.5 per cent, with immediate effect. The charges will appear on your payslip as “government levy”, and will apply to frontline public workers in health, education, transport and local services and also to MPs, Ministers of State and the Attorney-General. ...Couldn’t happen, could it? Actually it has, and close to home. ...public sector pay in the Republic has been cut. Not frozen, sharply cut. ...although the payslips have been changed for many months now, the schools are open, the hospitals treat the sick, rubbish is collected and paper pushed around briskly enough in public organisations. Belts are tight all right and pips are squeaking; but the country whose public pay once led the EU league has not imploded into the chaos of suicidal strikes, unburied bodies, closed schools and garbage mountains, which the UK or France would expect as a matter of course if a government did any such thing. ...Yet the pay cuts — I say again, 10 to 15 per cent cuts in pay, real and immediate holes in the family budget — have not caused the enraged citizenry to pull down the pillars of the temple around their own heads and everybody else’s. They just haven’t. Why? ...unlike the self-righteous whiners who speak for British public service unions, middle-Ireland still knows that a secure and pensionable job is a privilege: that working in the public sector is not an altruistic gift to the nation, but a damn lucky break. I saw a spirited, self-mocking sketch performed by 12-year-olds in a village hall entertainment the other night about “Marty Matchmaker O’Donoghue, where every ould stocking will find an ould shoe”. The girl being advertised to the men is talked up by the matchmaker as having “a Government Job! A clerk at the council office — I tell ye, she’s a laying hen!” Friends confirm that it’s an old saying: “Marry a teacher or a nurse, you’ve got a laying hen.” It does not seem that way in boom times, but even in the UK it is becoming true.

Bad News from Prague

Last month, this blog noted the bad news from Ireland, where voters were bullied into endorsing the so-called Lisbon Treaty to create a bigger and more powerful European Union bureaucracy in Brussels. Now, the last obstacle has been cleared as Czech President Vaclav Klaus has signed the pact. The Euro-crats in Brussels are overjoyed, but this agreement will mean more bureaucracy, more centralization, and more harmonization. It also makes the EU even more anti-democratic. Reuters reports:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus signed the European Union's Lisbon Treaty Tuesday, bringing into force the EU's plan to overhaul its institutions and win a greater role on the world stage. Klaus was the last EU leader to ratify the treaty and his signature, coming after the top Czech court cleared the pact, means the bloc of nearly half a billion people can pick its first-ever long-time president and a more powerful foreign representative.

Bad News from Ireland

There's no sugar-coating the election results. Irish voters, hit hard by the global recession and plunging property values, inexplicably decided that these factors somehow justified voting for the Lisbon Treaty (a.k.a., the EU Constitution) and giving more power to the statist bureaucracy in Brussels. The Wall Street Journal Europe is appropriately skeptical about whether this was the right decision:

The people of Ireland approved the treaty 67.1% to 32.9%, with a 59% turnout—higher participation and wider margins than the "No" camp had been able to muster when the Irish rejected the same charter last year. ...Brussels now tells us the vote was a resounding Yes for further centralization of power in the EU's 27 member states, and represented satisfaction that Ireland had secured guarantees for its neutrality and abortion laws. A more convincing explanation is the global recession, which has hit the Celtic Tiger particularly hard. Irish unemployment now runs to 12.6%. Standard & Poor's has yanked the country's triple-A credit rating, which in turn has ratcheted up borrowing costs. All this made voters more susceptible to the argument that another "No" could have jeopardized Ireland's membership in the euro club and its access to the EU's single market—a baseless scenario that nonetheless was bound to have an effect on an electorate with pocketbook worries. ...one wonders how much economic authority the Irish are really prepared to hand over to Brussels, especially if that means giving it an effective veto (in the name of eradicating "unfair tax competition") over Dublin's pro-growth tax policies. It was those policies—and not membership in the EU, which dates to the early 1970s—that were chiefly responsible for transforming Ireland from one of the poorest countries in Europe in the early 1990s to one of the richest. All the more remarkable is that Ireland did this in the teeth of resistance from the same Brussels bureaucracy in which it now puts its trust.

This means President Klaus of the Czech Republic is the only meaningful barrier standing in the way of further centralization of the European Union. This is the man who has resisted the fanatics on global warming hysteria, so he has backbone. On behalf of the 26 nations that were denied a vote, let's hope he holds firm.