So I finally decided to do something about it. Or, to be more accurate, I said yes when my friend Les Rubin decided we should co-author a book about America’s fiscal crisis.
We didn’t write this book to become rich. If we actually sell enough copies to earn royalties, I’ll be delighted.
Not because of the money, but rather because that will actually show there’s some interest in saving the country from fiscal decay.
To help introduce the book, Les and I just wrote a column for the Foundation for Economic Education. Here are some highlights.
The United States is in fiscal trouble. The burden of government spending has increased by nearly $3 trillion over the past 10 years—nearly doubling in just one decade! And that…is bad news whether the spending is financed by taxes, borrowing, or money printing. To make matters worse, the burden of spending will get even heavier in the coming decades, mostly because politicians have saddled the nation with poorly designed entitlement programs… To raise the alarm, we’ve written a book, The Greatest Ponzi Scheme on Earth, that explains America’s fiscal mess. It explains how we…will suffer an economic crisis if we leave policy on autopilot. That’s the bad news. The good news is that our book shows that the…reasonable solution…is for government spending to grow slower than the economy. …Politicians could still increase spending, but only by modest amounts. Maybe 2 percent annual spending increases rather than the 7+ percent spending increases that we’ve seen over the past 10 years. In our book, we show examples of countries that have long-run spending restraint (super-successful economies such as Switzerland and Singapore). But we also show examples of nations that dug themselves out of fiscal trouble merely by having multi-year periods of spending restraint. And if countries such as New Zealand, Canada, and Sweden can address their fiscal problems, surely we should demand the same from the crowd in Washington.
As you might expect, we also show how countries like Greece got in trouble.
We also describe the entitlement reforms that are needed to save America from that fate.
Dan Mitchell is co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and Chairman of the Board. He is an expert in international tax competition and supply-side tax policy.
