Raising Taxes Won’t Reduce the Deficit

With just weeks to go before America slides off the so-called Fiscal Cliff, many politicians and pundits argue that we must forge a “grand bargain” which includes tax increases and spending cuts. But now, two noted economists have crunched the numbers and conclude that Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was right when he said, “Politicians will always spend every penny of tax raised and whatever else they can get away with.” 

Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal and Richard Vedder of Ohio University recently updated a study done for the congressional Joint Economic Committee in the late 1980s that found every dollar of new taxes led to more than a dollar of new spending by Congress.

Moore and Vedder “found that over the entire post World War II era through 2009 each dollar of new tax revenue was associated with $1.17 of new spending. Politicians spend the money as fast as it comes in—and a little bit more.”

They looked at different time periods, used different data, altered other variables, and never once found that higher tax collections resulted in less government spending. These results completely counter the argument that we can solve our nation’s fiscal problems by combining spending cuts with tax increases.

The “grand bargain” isn’t such a bargain after all. The only way to cut spending…is to cut spending.

Steve Buckstein is founder and Senior Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.