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The good news about our newly divided government is that this sort of reckless extravagance will now be harder to engineer. Democrats are not about to go along with any tax cuts that Republicans would want. So a measure of fiscal responsibility could make a comeback.
That’s the historical pattern when power is split between the two parties. It was
during a period of divided government in the 1990s that our elected officials took the steps needed to produce actual surpluses in the federal budget. For a few years there, believe it or not, the government spent less money than it took in.
The late William Niskanen, who headed Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, detected a pattern.
In the years since World War II, he noted in 2006, the only periods of fiscal restraint were “the last six years of the Eisenhower administration and the last six years of the Clinton administration, both intervals in which the opposition controlled Congress.” Spending grew three times faster under unified government, he found, than under divided government.
This formula held under Barack Obama. “Virtually all net spending increases during the Obama administration were enacted during 2009-10, when Democrats controlled Congress,” writes Brian Riedl, a budget analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. After the GOP took over the House in 2011 (and the Senate in 2015), it curbed his plans.
In Obama’s final six years, nearly $900 billion in spending cuts were signed into law.
“The fiscal restraint from 2011 through 2016 resulted from gridlock,” Riedl concludes — and the gridlock came from you-know-what. But Republicans are better at forcing budget restraint on Democratic presidents than on Republican ones.
Over the decade ahead of us, the deficit will keep growing regardless, thanks to past tax cuts, rising interest payments, increases in defense spending and the growing cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Attacking those causes, granted, will be even harder with the split in Congress. But let’s not kid ourselves. Congress has ignored them over the past two years, and odds are it would have kept doing so even with a Republican House.
Our leaders have shown little inclination to take the steps needed to make the fiscal situation (or much else) any better. Now, at least, it won’t be so easy for them to make it worse.
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