Sooner or later, Gov. Mike Dunleavy will get a budget from lawmakers that doesn’t balance spending and revenue. “They’re kicking the deficit can down the road again,” he might say as he orders further cuts via line item vetoes. “It’s the definition of insanity.”<\/p>\n
Both are expressions Dunleavy has used before to defend his economic solution to our protracted budget deficit. He’s right that the Legislature, in which he served, avoided the problem. And by ignoring the failed austerity experiments in two midwestern states, he might be writing his own story of budget insanity.<\/p>\n
In the past decade, the governors of Kansas and Oklahoma enacted deep tax cuts to public education, health care and other services. They promised it would spur private sector growth. It never happened.<\/p>\n
Dunleavy doesn’t have to cut taxes because we hardly pay any. But he has steadfastly refused to consider enacting any to close our budget gap. And he, too, envisions the private sector will revive our economy.<\/p>\n
[Opinion: Let’s teach our kids science, not scare them with half-truths]<\/a><\/ins><\/p>\n To be fair, the Kansas and Oklahoma tax cuts don’t tell the whole story. But the spending by their predecessors didn’t either. Large economies are too complicated for such simple tales. That’s one reason why economists who prescribe shrinking the size of government as a cure for everything shouldn’t be trusted.<\/p>\n Robert J. Samuelson offers another.<\/p>\n “I have slowly and somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that many economists (and this applies across the political spectrum) often don’t know what they’re talking about,” he wrote in The Washington Post last week.<\/p>\n The evidence, he argues, is in their frequent failure “to foresee major economic trends” such as the recent plunge of interest rates, the 2008 financial crisis that initiated the Great Recession and double-digit inflation in the 1970s.<\/p>\n As a journalist covering the economy for almost 50 years, Samuelson qualifies his judgment by stating the obvious. “Most economists … are extremely smart and well-informed” and “a lot smarter” than him. The problem is “they exaggerate what they know and how much they can influence the economy.” And they usually do it “to gain and retain political relevance and power.”<\/p>\n