RALEIGH – I don’t know about you, but I dread returning to work after a long holiday for a particular reason: it means having to attack a high, teetering stack of must-reads on the corner of my desk, but only after sifting through many hundreds of unanswered emails, many of them consisting of links to still more must-reads online.
Now, just to be clear, I’m not complaining about the reading itself. I love reading. I spent much of my holiday attacking my pleasure-reading stack at home, polishing off a sci-fi novel and several military-history journals that have been gathering dust since last summer.
The problem with work-related reading, though, is that it isn’t just reading. There’s actual work involved. As that clever young Englishman John Locke once wrote, “those who have read of everything are thought to understand everything too, but it is not always so – reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge. It is thinking that makes what is read ours.”
In the case of political junkies and policy nerds like me, it’s not enough to think for a spell about the latest correspondence, statistical reports, magazine articles, and books on politics and public policy. We need to act on them. We need to answer the emails and letters, place the resulting meetings events on our calendars, file and route some new bits of data, blog and opine on others, and mark up the long-form essays and books for subsequent reviews.
Hey, it beats some jobs I did in my youth – covering school-board meetings for local newspapers and washing cars in the August heat, for starters – but it is time-consuming and often tedious work.
As I began working my way through my November-December stacks and inboxes, however, I rediscovered just how nerdy I am. When the subject matter was fiscal policy, I enjoyed myself. I was fascinated by the number of articles and essays on the federal budget deficit, the national debt, the state pension crisis, the looming entitlement crisis, and the economic consequences of tax policies. Whatever else the Tea Party accomplished in 2010, it put government spending and borrowing back at the top of the political priority list for the first time since Ross Perot brought his goofy visual aids onto “Larry King Live.”
I’m still processing some of the new finds. But here are a few readings I’ll pass along to you right now, with limited editorial commentary:
• Three American Enterprise Institute researchers – Andrew Biggs, Kevin Hassett, and Matt Jensen – had a great op-ed last week in The Wall Street Journal that served as a follow-up to a previous piece about the international experience with government deficits and fiscal responses. The research question was a timely one: what’s the most effective way to close budget gaps? Should policymakers cut spending, raise taxes, or mix the two strategies in equal measure?
After careful study of 21 instances of fiscal imbalance among developed countries, their conclusion was that “successful attempts to balance budgets rely almost entirely on reducing government expenditures, while unsuccessful ones rely heavily on tax increases.”
• I’m way late in my reading of the Claremont Review of Books, which is why I hadn’t seen until now an interesting essay by William Voegeli on Rep. Paul Ryan’s famous roadmap for balancing the federal budget. Voegeli is a bit too pessimistic for my taste. But he does allow for the possibility that if politicians finally start treating American voters as adults, “capable of realizing that our social insurance system cannot over the long haul confer more in benefits than it secures through taxes,” a strong political coalition for fiscal conservatism can be developed and sustained. “We should not conclude that a government of grown-ups, by grown-ups, and for grown-ups will perish from the earth … until we’ve made strenuous efforts to reestablish it.” Agreed.
• Those who continue to adhere to the Magical Pixie Dust theory of macroeconomics, otherwise known as Keynesianism, may be immune to rational discourse at this point. But perhaps the latest work by two Hoover Institution scholars, John Cogan and John Taylor, can pull at least a few back into reality. Why did the Obama administration’s stimulus strategy fail? Because, as the two Johns observe, much of it consisted of federal borrowing to protect state and local government payrolls from the effects of the recession. Rather than transforming economic behavior in some fundamental sense, it was largely an accounting exercise. “The implication of our empirical research … is not that the stimulus was too small, but rather that such countercyclical programs are inherently limited,” they write.
Okay, enough stalling. Back to the stack I go.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.