Does "Starve the Beast" work?

• Author: Tempelman, Jerry H.
• Position: Tax reduction to reduce government spending

Starve-the-beast proponents believe that in order to tame the beast, one needs to starve it, with the beast being an obvious reference to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan depiction of an out-of-control state apparatus. The idea of tax reductions as a way to enforce discipline in government spending holds regardless of whether the nation is in the midst of an economic expansion or a recession.

Following the recurrence of federal budget deficits that coincided with the enactment of federal tax cuts during 2001-2003, the starve-the-beast approach to fiscal policy that once was one of the underpinnings of the Reagan Revolution has become increasingly controversial. It is no longer mainly the political left that criticizes the starve-the-beast approach. Even some Republicans who once participated in the move to a smaller government during the Reagan presidency now criticize starve-the-beast thinking. Recently, William Niskanen (2005) has used statistical evidence to demonstrate that a decrease in taxes in a given year is followed by an increase in spending the next. Bruce Bartlett (2005) has proposed raising taxes, namely by introducing a value-added tax, presumably to prevent having to increase less efficient income taxes later.

Criticism of the starve-the-best approach to taxation is intuitively persuasive. The 2001-2003 tax cuts did not result in any meaningful spending reductions and, if anything, were followed by spending increases instead, on items such as the Medicare prescription drug bill, the war in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. After a brief period of budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration, budget deficits have returned, and with them concerns over fiscal sustainability.

The starve-the-beast approach to fiscal policy considers reductions in tax revenues the most effective way to reduce, or at least hold down, government spending. Although tax reductions may initially lead to budget deficits, starve-the-beast proponents see public outcries over the accumulation of federal debt and budget deficits as the key mechanism by which elected officials are likely to self-impose spending restraint.

The most influential advocate of the starve-the-beast approach is Milton Friedman. Although his Wall Street Journal op-ed "What Every American Wants" (Friedman 2003) is his most complete and well-known exposition of the starve-the-beast approach, the starve-the-beast theme was a recurring topic in his columns that appeared in Newsweek between 1966 and 1984. The following passage is from a column Friedman wrote almost 40 years ago in 1967:

Postavar experience has demonstrated ... that Congress will spend whatever the tax system will raise--plus a little (and recently, a lot) more.... If taxes are raised in order to keep down the deficit, the result is likely to be a higher norm for government spending. Deficits will again mount and the process will be repeated [Friedman 1975: 90]. Friedman, in turn, has credited the British political scientist C. Northcote Parkinson as an influence on his starve-the-beast approach (see Friedman 1975: 100; 1978: 12; 1983b: 325-27). Parkinson is perhaps best known for Parkinson's Law, which holds that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" (Parkinson [1957] 1993: 2). Parkinson's influence on starve-the-beast theory is his lesser known Second Law, which holds that "expenditure rises to meet income." Thus, if one is to eliminate government waste, it is essential "to reduce the total revenue. Officials are less inclined to squander what is not there" (Parkinson [1960] 1971: 5, ix).

Although the starve-the-beast approach is controversial, Friedman is by no means its sole proponent. Other prominent advocates include Gary Becker, Edward Lazear, and Kevin Murphy (2003), who have argued that "government spending responds to tax revenues, so that lower revenues imply lower government spending." Robert Barro (2001) has argued that "'tax cuts remove revenues from Washington and thereby keep Congress from spending them." He has also noted that "one attraction of tax cuts and deficits is that they starve the government of revenue and thereby promote spending restraint" (Barro 2003).

Ronald Reagan and Starve the Beast

Attempts to limit taxes and government spending at the federal level began during the 1970s, and were first enacted during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. President Reagan had previously been governor of California during its taxpayer revolt that began in the 1960s.

The tax cuts advocated by and implemented during the Reagan administration were founded on a combination of essentially two underlying rationales: supply-side economics and starve-the-beast theory (Wessel and Seib 2004). President Reagan modeled his tax cuts on the previously introduced Kemp-Roth legislation, which its congressional sponsors had intended to be an implementation of supply-side economics rather than of starve-the-beast theory. There is a famous account about President Reagan instinctively understanding the supply-side incentive benefits of lower marginal tax rates from his days as a film actor, when the top tax bracket was approximately 90 percent: "You could only make four pictures and then you were in the top bracket. So we all quit working after four pictures and went off to the country" (Stockman 1987: 10-11; Cannon 1991: 90-91).

But Reagan's rationale was also very much one of starve-the-beast theory, as evidenced by another often-quoted statement:

There were always those who told us that taxes couldn't be cut until spending was reduced. Well, you know, we can lecture our children about extravagance until we run out of voice and breath. Or we can cure their extravagance by simply reducing their allowance [Reagan 1081]. In spite of its supply-side origins, many conservative economists and commentators supported Kemp-Roth on starve-the-beast grounds of lower tax revenues and lower government spending. Herbert Stein (1978) questioned supply-siders's revenue-raising claims and argued, "'The real case for the Kemp-Roth bill [is] that a large part of the taxes that are being collected now and that would be collected in the future would not be used to serve imperative social needs.'"

George Will (1978) favored Kemp-Roth "'as a political choice rather than as an indisputable economic calculation,'" and argued that "the principal effect of Kemp-Roth would be to restrain the predictable growth of government that is financed by windfall revenues generated by the perverse chemistry of progressive taxation and high inflation." He cites Alan Greenspan, then in between his chairmanships of the Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve Board, as having endorsed Kemp-Roth and stating that "the basic purpose of any tax-cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there's a political limit to deficit spending."

Irving Kristol (1978) called Kemp-Roth "exactly the right medicine for what ails us at this time," and argued that first balancing the budget by cutting expenditures and then cutting taxes is "prudent bookkeeping but betrays a naive ignorance of the dynamics of political economy." According to Kristol, "the...