Let’s celebrate some good news.
When politicians can be convinced (or pressured) to exercise even a modest bit of spending restraint, it’s remarkably simple to get positive results.
Here’s some of what I wrote earlier this year.
…one of the few recent victories for fiscal responsibility was the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA), which only was implemented because of a fight that year over the debt limit. At the time, the establishment was screaming and yelling about risky brinksmanship. But the net result is that the BCA ultimately resulted in the sequester, which was a huge victory that contributed to much better fiscal numbers between 2009–2014.
And “much better fiscal numbers” really are much better.
Here’s a chart I put together showing how the burden of federal spending declined between 2009 and 2014. And this happened for the simple reason that spending was flat and the economy had a bit of growth.
But now let’s look at some bad news.