Progress Daily

Stephen Slivinski has just published his first book, Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government.

Slivinski tabulates that under the average united government — i.e., one-party control of the presidency, House, and Senate — the growth of real per-capita government spending is 3.4%. Under divided government, this growth rate is only 1.5% — less than half as fast.

United Democratic government and united Republican government look virtually the same: 3.3% government growth under Democrats vs. 3.6% under Republicans.

The most libertarian configuration of all turns out to be Democratic president + Republican Congress. Average rate of government growth: .4%. (Slivinski doesn’t mention the other plausible libertarian benefit of this combination — less interventionist foreign policy.)

“The Libertarian Case for Divided Government” by Bryan Caplan

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at 9:35 am and is filed under Economics, Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.