Nobel laureate James Buchanan has been in the news lately, especially because of a book that seeks to link his 7000 pages of economic writing to both Dixiecrat segregationists and Charles Koch’s secret plan “to radically alter our government in ways that will be devastating to millions of people.” The thesis of Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean is that public choice economics is a radical plan to “shackle the people’s power,” “to put democracy in chains.” Oddly, she claims (without evidence), he set out on this project because he resented the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education — which of course used “undemocratic” means to overturn the democratic decisions of legislatures in various states.

Buchanan certainly was concerned with how to achieve justice, efficiency, and “prevention of discrimination against minorities” in the context of majority rule. Throughout his work he explored how to design constitutional rules to bring about optimal outcomes, including a balanced budget requirement, supermajorities, and constitutional protection of individual rights. He worried that both majorities and legislatures would be short-sighted, economically ignorant or inefficient, and indifferent to the imposition of burdens on others.

And today a Washington Post column by Dana Milbank illustrates one of the big problems that Buchanan sought to solve: the temptation of legislatures to spend money with little regard for what two of his students called “deficits, debt, and debasement.” Looking outward from Hurricane Harvey to the upcoming congressional session, Milbank wrings his hands:

Harvey makes landfall in Washington as soon as next week, when President Trump is expected to ask for what could be tens of billions of dollars in storm relief. And paying for storm recovery — probably with few offsetting spending cuts — will be but the first blow to fiscal discipline in what looks to be a particularly active, and calamitous, spending season.

It’s not just disaster relief. The Pentagon is hoping for tens of billions of additional dollars. And Republicans may pivot from “tax reform” to mere tax cuts. It’s easier just to spend money and cut taxes than to reform the flood insurance program, make the tax system more efficient, and focus military spending on actual defense needs, much less to think about the national debt and the next generation.

Trump, who came to power promising to eliminate the $20 trillion debt, or at least to cut it in half, is poised to oversee an exponential increase in that debt. Republicans, who came to power with demands that Washington tackle the debt problem, could wind up doing at least as much damage to the nation’s finances as the Democrats did.…

If the red ink rises according to worst-case forecasts, “we’re talking additions to the debt in the trillions,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, tells me. All from actions to be taken in the next few months. “It turns out the Republican-run Congress is not willing to make the hard choices,” she says. “It is a fiscal free-lunch mentality on all sides.”

We’ve heard a lot over the past few years about a “dysfunctional” Congress. Many critics mean that Congress doesn’t pass enough laws. But this is the real dysfunction: a Congress that spends money with little thought to the future. The national debt doubled under President George W. Bush and doubled again under President Barack Obama. President Trump and the Republican Congress are just getting started, but the prospects don’t look good.

Milbank, MacGuineas, and others who worry about the “fiscal free-lunch mentality” should read some Buchanan. As one scholar put it in a reflection on Buchanan’s work, “Perhaps legislatures would do better if supermajorities were required whenever transfers to current recipients will burden future generations.” Perhaps so. And perhaps constitutional guarantees of individual rights, judicial protection of those rights, and limits on the legislature’s free-lunch mentality are all part of what Buchanan called the constitutional political economy of a free society.

What links the solar eclipse, Brexit, female labor market decisions and the border adjustment tax? 

Discussion of all these issues seems to confuse or conflate measured economic activity (GDP) with general economic welfare.

Take the eclipse first. On 18th August, NBC News ran a story headlined “Solar Eclipse Will Cost America Almost $700 Million in Lost Productivity.” For starters this is a bizarre headline. Productivity is usually measured as output per worker-hour, so it is unclear why taking a break to watch the sun disappear would affect the amount you produce in the hours you do work.

Most likely the authors really meant total output, or GDP. Even then it is not clear that this need be true. Workers may have become more productive before or afterwards to compensate for their “time off.” They may also have worked longer in other periods to compensate for the break.

But let’s suppose workers all really did take the time off without any compensating effort or hours elsewhere, and as a result total output fell across the US. Would this matter and would it be “bad for the economy”?

The point of free markets is that they allow us as individuals and groups to make decisions to fulfill our own objectives. Clearly, many of us make decisions not to maximize our lifetime productivity or measured output, and thus do nor maximize GDP. Think of the lawyer who decides to change career and become a teacher, or those with marketable skills who decide to use their time for voluntary work or family life.

If in the process of making free decisions we decide to dedicate more time to activities that reflect our own preferences, then we are maximizing our own welfare. Though the measured economy may be marginally smaller as a result of the eclipse, the fact that many individuals decided it was worth their while to take time out to view suggests their lives were enriched by the experience.

The nature of free choice also gets downplayed in the debate about female labor force participation. Often we hear how much of an economic boost there would be if more women worked, or female productivity improved, and certainly this might boost measured GDP and even improve the public finances. But if decisions to spend a period out of the labor force, or else to pursue an occupation with more time for family-related activities, reflects personal preferences (for either sex), then allowing these free decisions raises economic welfare. It doesn’t “hurt the economy.”

Another example of this arose in the debate about the proposed border-adjustment tax. A new paper by Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff and Guillermo LaGarda modeled the effects of the Republican “Better Way” plan on taxation, and found a significant overall boost to the US capital stock, wages and GDP. Yet by 2100 they found that GDP would actually be lower. Bad news for the US economy, right? No, because (as the authors argue) this would be a reflection of higher wages leading to more people deciding to spend time on leisure. In economic welfare terms, they would still be better off.

Similar reasoning applies in other areas. Several UK economists criticized a report by the Economists for Free Trade group last week for adding the savings from not having to make net contributions to the EU budget to other growth benefits to obtain a total GDP boost. This critique was right as a matter of arithmetic – after all, a £ saving to taxpayers is not the same as the overall effect of that saving on the economy. But undoubtedly a reduction in the burden on UK taxpayers would increase their economic welfare, because they would be free to make more individual decisions about how to spend their money.

All this is not to say that GDP is not, in many cases, a good overall proxy for welfare. Bad policies can both curb reduce GDP and overall economic welfare. Of course, there are other known limitations to its use too including that it includes the production/​consumption of goods with negative externalities, leaves out illegal or domestic activity, and often cannot keep up with the improvements in quality of goods.

What the above examples show, however, is that we should be particularly wary when people start talking about how people’s free decisions “hurt the economy.” We value leisure and the ability to fulfill our own desires too.

To be blunt, Republicans are heading in the wrong direction on fiscal policy. They have full control of the executive and legislative branches, but instead of using their power to promote Reaganomics, it looks like we’re getting a reincarnation of the big-government Bush years.

As Yogi Berra might have said, “it’s déjà vu all over again.”

Let’s look at the evidence. According to The Hill, the Keynesian virus has infected GOP thinking on tax cuts.

Republicans are debating whether parts of their tax-reform package should be retroactive in order to boost the economy by quickly putting more money in people’s wallets.

That is nonsense. Just as giving people a check and calling it “stimulus” didn’t help the economy under Obama, giving people a check and calling it a tax cut won’t help the economy under Trump.

Tax cuts boost growth when they reduce the marginal tax rate on productive behavior such as work, saving, investment, or entrepreneurship. When that happens, people have an incentive to generate more income. And that leads to more national income, a.k.a., economic growth.

Borrowing money from the economy’s left pocket and then stuffing checks (oops, I mean retroactive tax cuts) in the economy’s right pocket, by contrast, simply reallocates national income.

Indeed, this is one of the reasons why the economy didn’t get much benefit from the 2001 Bush tax cut, especially when compared to the growth-oriented 2003 tax cut. Unfortunately, Republicans haven’t learned that lesson.

Republicans have taken steps in the past to ensure that taxpayers directly felt the benefits of tax cuts. As part of the 2001 tax cuts enacted by President George W. Bush, taxpayers received rebate checks.

The article does include some analysis from people who understand that retroactive tax cuts aren’t economically beneficial.

…there are also drawbacks to making tax changes retroactive. …such changes would add to the cost of the bill, but would not be an effective way to encourage new spending and investments. “It has all of the costs of the tax cuts but none of the economic benefits,” said Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas, who added that “you don’t make investments in the rear-view mirror.”

I’m not always on the same side as Maya, but she’s right on this issue. You can’t encourage people to generate more income in the past. If you want more growth, you have to reduce marginal tax rates on future activity.

By the way, I’m not arguing that there is no political benefit to retroactive tax cuts.

If Republicans simply stated that they were going to send rebate checks to curry favor with voters, I’d roll my eyes and shrug my shoulders.

But when they make Keynesian arguments to justify such a policy, I can’t help but get upset about the economic illiteracy.

Speaking of bad economic policy, GOPers also are pursuing bad spending policy.

Politico has a report on a potential budget deal where everyone wins…except taxpayers.

The White House is pushing a deal on Capitol Hill to head off a government shutdown that would lift strict spending caps long opposed by Democrats in exchange for money for President Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico, multiple sources said.

So much for Trump’s promise to get tough on the budget, even if it meant a shutdown.

Instead, the back-room negotiations are leading to more spending for all interest groups.

Marc Short, the White House’s director of legislative affairs, …also lobbied for a big budget increase for the Pentagon, another priority for Trump. …The White House is offering Democrats more funding for their own pet projects.

The only good news is that Democrats are so upset about the symbolism of the fence that they may not go for the deal.

Democrats show no sign of yielding on the issue. They have already blocked the project once.

Unfortunately, I expect this is just posturing. When the dust settles, I expect the desire for more spending (from both parties) will produce a deal that is bad news. At least for those of us who don’t want America to become Greece (any faster than already scheduled).

Republican and Democratic congressional aides have predicted for months that both sides will come together on a spending agreement to raise spending caps for the Pentagon as well as for nondefense domestic programs.

So let’s check our scorecard. On the tax side of the equation, we’ll hopefully still get some good policy, such as a lower corporate tax rate, but it probably will be accompanied by some gimmicky Keynesian policy.

On the spending side of the equation, it appears my fears about Trump may have been correct and he’s going to be a typical big-government Republican.

It’s possible, of course, that I’m being needlessly pessimistic and we’ll get the kinds of policies I fantasized about in early 2016. But I wouldn’t bet money on a positive outcome.

The federal government plays a large role in the nation’s highways through the funding of aid programs for the states and the imposing of top-down regulations. Congress passed a major highway bill in 2015 that authorized $305 billion in spending over five years, of which $226 billion was for highways and most of the rest for urban transit.

The Trump administration is promising a fresh approach to highway spending and regulation. What are the main problems with current highway policies, and what reforms should the administration pursue?

Transportation expert Gabriel Roth and I examine these questions in a new study at Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org. We review the history of federal highway interventions, describe the inefficiencies of federal aid and regulations, and discuss possible reforms.

We argue that Americans would be better off if federal highway and transit spending, fuel taxes, and related regulations were cut. The states can more efficiently tackle their transportation needs with a reduced federal role, and they would be more likely to pursue privatization and other market-based reforms.

Our primer on federal highway policies is here.

“Europe’s Taxes Aren’t as Progressive as Its Leaders Like to Think,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph C. Sternberg yesterday. Citing tax expert Stefan Bach from the German Institute for Economic Research, Sternberg shows how Germany’s tax system is only mildly progressive overall. Sternberg therefore states that politicians need to “tackle” indirect taxation if they want to have a major impact on the economy.

Now, Sternberg is undoubtedly right that broad-based tax systems which incorporate social contributions and VATs tend to be less progressive than those which rely more heavily on progressive income taxes. That is, if we narrowly look at the effects of taxes alone, rather than government spending. But does it make any economic sense to look at a tax system in isolation?

Good economic theory would suggest that to the extent we care about progressivity and redistribution, revenues should be collected in the least distortionary way possible, with redistribution done via cash transfers. So judging the desirability of a tax system by its degree of progressivity is not a good starting point. From an economic perspective, the assessment should be how distortionary different taxation systems across the world are. European tax systems have huge problems in this regard, but their progressivity or otherwise should not be a major consideration.

The second and more important related point is that assessing progressivity should not seek to separate the issues of taxes from transfers. To judge progressivity, one must look at the position of households across the income spectrum after both, not least because one person’s taxes are (now or later) another person’s cash transfer.

I cannot find figures to do this for Germany, but am familiar with some headline UK and US stats.

Every year when the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) releases its publication “The effects of taxes and benefits on household income, historical datasets” a similar lament to Sternberg’s arises. Calculating total taxes paid as a proportion of gross income (market income plus government cash transfers), critics of the tax system assert that the poorest quintile pay 35.0% of their gross income in taxes, on average, which is almost identical to the average 34.1% for the top quintile (2015/16 figures). Like Sternberg, many conclude that the tax system is not progressive enough.

Yet a few seconds’ thought to what these figures show highlights how misleading this is. Gross income (the denominator in the calculation) includes cash transfers, which are transfers from one group to another. That a household uses money redistributed to it to spend, in turn paying what the ONS describes as indirect taxes (things like VAT, beer duty, tobacco duty, the TV license and fuel duty), can hardly be described as “regressive”. This is akin to taking from Peter to pay Paul and then saying that – because Paul spends a large proportion of this money – the tax system is unfair.

Put simply, benefits don’t fall like manna from heaven. One person’s taxes are someone else’s cash transfers. That the tax system is not ultra-progressive then is not what matters – it’s what the overall tax AND transfers system does that counts.

Thought of in this way, we can calculate effective tax rates, which measure the net contribution for the average household in each income quintile as a proportion of their market income. This is key: how much of the income that you earn is being taxed away and given to others? I.e. how progressive is the taxpayer-funded welfare state.

Table 1 shows the poorest fifth of households in the UK on average actually face an effective tax rate (all taxes minus cash benefits, divided by earned income) of ‑34.1 per cent, while the richest fifth face an average tax rate of 31.8 per cent. This means that, for every £1 earned in market income, the average household in the poorest quintile is transferred another 34.1p in cash benefits, while the average household in the top decile pays 31.8p in tax. The tax and cash transfers system, in other words, is very progressive.

But even this excludes so-called “benefits in kind,” which the UK state provides lots of, and which disproportionately benefit the poor. Once benefits-in-kind (education, healthcare, and subsidies for housing, rail and buses) are considered, these effective tax rates for the average household in the richest and poorest fifths become ‑140.2 per cent and 25.3 per cent respectively (see Table 2).

Now, the UK figures are not completely comprehensive. Unlike the figures below for the US (below), they do not seek to assign the impact of corporate income taxes on workers across the income distribution. They also exclude the cash-value benefits of other public goods, such as defense, law and order etc., and the courts which uphold property rights, where there is an argument that the rich benefit disproportionately (though development work stresses the importance of property rights for the poor too). But overall, it’s clear that welfare states are hugely redistributive.

Can similar figures be found for the US? The best comparator figures I can find come from the CBO’s June 2016 report “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2013.” There are three important differences in the methodology from the UK figures which means they are likely to look more progressive on the surface: the quintiles are assigned by market income, rather than disposable income; the transfers include transfers from state and local programs but only federal taxes (and sales taxes tend to be more regressive); and the figures presented include in-kind assistance, meaning they are closer in methodology to Table 2 than Table 1. But the results show the same trend.

The average household in the bottom quintile receives around $2.90 in cash transfers or in-kind benefits for every $1 earned, against the top quintile which faced an effective tax rate of 24.8%. Interestingly, as Greg Mankiw noted before, middle income Americans have shifted since 1979 from being, on average, net contributors to net beneficiaries under this measure.

Of course, averages hide a lot of information. Government programs redistribute heavily to those with children and to old people. But if we are going to assess crude measures of progressivity by looking across the income spectrum, it makes sense to include transfers too.

In conclusion, there are many problems with tax systems here and in Europe. But aiming to make them more progressive should not be an underlying economic aim. To the extent that redistribution is considered a valid goal, it should be undertaken through spending, and these stats above show countries such as the US and UK are already hugely redistributive or “progressive” in this regard. 

“Is Amazon getting too big?” asks Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, in a 4000-word column seeking justification for the Democrat Party’s quixotic pledge to “break up big companies” in its recent “Better Deal.” “Just this week,” notes Pearlstein, “Democrats cited stepped-up antitrust enforcement as a centerpiece of their plan to deliver ‘a better deal’ for Americans should they regain control of Congress and the White House.” He concludes by saying “it sometimes takes a little public power to keep private power in check.” But maybe it takes a lot of public power to write antitrust lawyers some big checks.

Politics aside, the question “Is Amazon getting too Big?” should have nothing to do with antitrust, which is supposedly about preventing monopolies from charging high prices. Surely no sane person would dare accuse Amazon of monopoly or high prices. 

Even Mr. Pearlstein has doubts: “Is Amazon so successful, is it getting so big, that it poses a threat to consumers or competition? By current antitrust standards, certainly not… Here is a company, after all, known for disrupting and turbocharging competition in every market it enters, lowering prices and forcing rivals to match the relentless efficiency of its operations and the quality of its service. That is, after all, usually how firms come to dominate an industry…”

That should have ended this story “by current antitrust standards.” But if we simply lower those standards, then “Better Way” antitrust shakedown threats could become far more numerous, unpredictable, and lucrative for politically-generous antitrust law firms. 

Among the 19 largest law firm contributions to political parties in 2015/2016, according to Open Secrets, all but one, Jones Day, contributed overwhelmingly to Democrats. More to the point, all of these law firms contributing most generously to the Democratic Party are specialists in antitrust and mergers: They appear on U.S. News list of top Antitrust attorneys. And the Trial Lawyers Association (now disguised as “American Association for Justice”) contributed over $2.1 million to Democrats, over $1 million to liberal organizations and $67,500 to Republicans.

Antitrust law is a very big, profitable and concentrated industry. Antitrust lawyers’ have a special interest in greatly expanding the reach and grip of antitrust law. They were surely delighted by Pearlstein’s prominent endorsement of law journal paper by Lina Khan, a 28-year old student and fellow at the “liberal-leaning” think tank New America.

Ms. Kahn believes it self-evident that low operating profits must prove Amazon is “choosing to price below-cost.” That’s uninformed accounting. What low profits actually show is that Amazon has been plowing-back rapidly expanding cash flow into capital expenditures, such cloud computing, a movie studio, and unique consumer electronics (Kindle and Echo).

 “If Amazon is not a monopolist, Khan asks, why are financial markets pricing its stock as if it is going to be?” That’s uninformed finance theory. Investors rightly see Amazon’s current and future growth of cash flow (the result of expensive investments) as the source of future dividends and/​or capital gains (more net assets per share).

Kahn believes antitrust has been unduly constrained by “The Chicago School approach to antitrust, which gained mainstream prominence and credibility in the 1970s and 1980s.” She thinks Chicago’s “undue focus on consumer welfare is misguided. It betrays legislative history, which reveals that Congress passed antitrust laws to promote a host of political economic ends.”

The trouble with grounding policy on legal precedent is that Congress passed many laws to promote the special interest of producers at the expense of consumers—including the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887), the National Economic Recovery Act (1933), the Civil Aeronautics Board (1938), and numerous tariffs and regulations designed to benefit interest groups and the politicians who represent them.

The well-named chapter “Antitrust Pork Barrel” in The Causes and Consequences of Antitrust quotes Judge Richard Posner noting that antitrust investigations are usually initiated “at the behest of corporations, trade associations, and trade unions whose motivation is at best to shift the cost of their private litigation to the taxpayer and at worse to harass competitors.”

To grasp how and why anti-trust is easily abused as a rent-seeking device, it helps to relearn the wisdom of Frederic Bastiat: “The seller wants the goods on the market to be scarce, in short supply, and expensive. The [buyer] wants them abundant, in plentiful supply, and cheap. Our laws should at least be neutral, not take the side of the seller against the buyer, of the producer against the consumer, of high prices against low prices, of scarcity against abundance [emphasis added].” 

Contrary to Bastiat, however, Ms. Kahn claims to have found “growing evidence shows that the consumer welfare frame has led to higher prices and few efficiencies.” 

Growing evidence turns out to mean three papers, one of which seems to say what she says it does (but only about mergers, not concentration): “Research by John Kwoka of Northeastern University,” Pearlstein writes, “has found that three-quarters of mergers have resulted in [were followed by?] price increases without any offsetting benefits. Kwoka cited industries such as airlines, hotels, car rentals, cable television and eyeglasses.” 

If you believe that, mergers left consumers overcharged by the Marriott hotel and Enterprise Rent-A-Car ‘monopolies.’ Even if that sounds plausible, Kwoka’s evidence does not. Two-thirds of his sample covers just three industries (petroleum, airlines, and professional journal publishing), the price estimates are unweighted without standard error data, and several mergers date back to 1976–82. As Federal Trade Commission economists Vita and Osinksi charitably noted, “Kwoka has drawn inferences and reached conclusions … that are unjustified by his data and his methods.”

Pearlstein turns to another paper in Kahn’s trio: “There is little debate that this cramped [Chicago] view of antitrust law has resulted in an economy where two-thirds of all industries are more concentrated than they were 20 years ago, according to a study by President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and many are dominated by three or four firms.” 

Nothing in Pearlstein’s statement is even approximately correct. The Obama CEA looked at shares revenue earned by two different lists of Top 50 firms (not “three or four”) in just 13 industries (not “all industries”) in 1997 and 2012. Pearlstein’s “two-thirds of all” really means 10 out of 13, though the U.S. has considerably more than 13 industries. In transportation, retailing, finance, real estate, utilities, and education, for example, the Top 50 had a slightly larger share of sales in 2012 than in 1997. So what?

Should we fear monopoly price gouging simply because 50 firms account for a larger share of the nation’s very large number of retail stores, real estate brokers, or finance companies? Of course not. “An increase in revenue concentration at the national level,” the Obama CEA concedes, “is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition in market power.”

The Obama CEA did add that “in a few industries… there is some evidence of increasing market concentration.” How few? Just three: Hospitals, railroads, and wireless providers. Those industries are heavily regulated, as is banking. 

The CEA notes the 10 largest banks had a larger share of bank loans in 2010 than in 1980, which is hardly a surprise. Hundreds of banks that existed before the 1981–82 stagflation and 2008-09 Great Recession had closed by 2010. More lending now flows through nonbanks and securities. And the Internet (e.g., lending tree) makes shopping for loans or credit cards more competitive than ever.

Did the Obama CEA present any evidence that its extraneous data about industry-level or market concentration “has led to higher prices and few efficiencies”? Certainly not. They made no such claim because so many previous efforts have failed. “The Market Concentration Doctrine” could not explain higher prices when Harold Demsetz examined it in 1973, and it still can’t.

For years, Randal O’Toole has warned governments that urban rail systems usually make no economic or practical sense. They are more expensive and less flexible than bus systems. But cities keep making wildly optimistic assumptions about rail costs and ridership, and new lines keep getting built. It is a triumph of politics over experience.

The other day, the Washington Post reported ridership data on phase 1 of D.C. Metro’s Silver Line:

But of the five stations that opened in July 2014, only the end-of-line Wiehle-Reston station has come close to projected ridership. At three stops in Tysons — McLean, Greensboro and Spring Hill — ridership is a mere fraction of what planners projected in a 2004 environmental impact report. In May of this year, for example, average daily weekday ridership was 1,618 at the McLean station, slightly below the 1,634 in May 2015 and well below the 3,803 the Silver Line was projected to serve in its first year of operation, according to the 2004 report.

So actual ridership on some parts of this Northern Virginia line are less than half of the original estimate. By the way, the cost of the project ended up almost doubling from what the planners and politicians had promised. Federal taxpayers picked up part of the tab.

Phase 2 of the project is under construction, and it will extend the Silver Line to Dulles Airport, 28 miles from D.C. The project never made sense to me. The airport already has the dedicated and congestion-free Dulles Access Road that connects the airport to the inner suburbs and downtown.

Let’s say you are a NYC businesswomen flying into Dulles for some lobbying in D.C. If you take the rail system, it will probably take you much longer to get downtown than if you took a taxi along the Access Road. Then when you get off the Metro downtown, you may still need a cab to get to your final destination.

Or let’s say you are a Virginia family flying out of Dulles on vacation. Would you want to drive to a Metro station with all your bags, leave your car parked there, and then risk missing your plane by taking the unreliable rail system? I don’t think so. I’ll bet ridership on Phase 2 of the Silver Line will come in low as well.

For decades, federal subsidies have induced state and local officials to build costly and inefficient light- and heavy-rail systems when bus systems and highway expansion generally make more sense. Congress should end the bias in favor of rail by ending federal aid for urban transit, as discussed at Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org.