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Originally Posted by Tiny
I thought that split government was most likely to keep the deficit down. It doesn't matter who controls what, just as long as one party doesn't control everything. And that if you don't have that, if Republicans controlled Congress and the presidency, they'd do better than the Democrats.
So when you proposed this before I was skeptical, and actually looked at deficits and composition of government by year. And you were right. A Democrat in the presidency and Republicans in the House appeared to be correlated with lower deficits than other situations. Newt Gingrich in the House and Clinton in the presidency is the classic example.
I probably posted something on that but don't have time to dig it up right now. This is because I'm currently working 18 hours a day as a slave to the United States federal government, as tax day (October 15) is just around the corner. I wish the mother fuckers hadn't made the tax code so cumbersome and complicated. I feel for CPA's right now. It's difficult enough being one of their clients.
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The second half of the 1990s was a truly remarkable era. Government spending as a percentage of GDP (which in my view is
always how it should be viewed) fell by more than three full percentage points.
Of course, strong growth abetted by productivity and technological advances in the dotcom era helped, but policy was headed in the right direction. The robust growth was -- I believe at least in part -- a consequence of those better policy decisions.
Bill Clinton intoned at the outset of a mid-'90s State of the Union address that:
"The era of big government is over!"
Shrewd political advisor Dick Morris got Bill to go all-in on the concept of "triangulation," after which he cooperated with Newt to restrain the growth of spending, and even cut the capital gains tax! (From 28% to 20%.)
Now I'm afraid we are in for a very difficult and chaotic decade, since the new rallying cry might as well be:
"The era of big government being over is -- FUCKING WELL ANCIENT HISTORY!!"
(Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead with Professor Stephanie's Magical MMT Machine.)
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