Yes Canada is (economically) in better shape right now, but not because they took the type of path you would recommend.
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How Spending Cuts—Not Higher Taxes—Saved Canada
Liberals up there listened to voters, and their economy is now growing faster than ours.
By FRED BARNES
When Jean Chretien became prime minister in 1993, Canada faced a fiscal and economic breakdown. The government's share of the economy had climbed to 53% in 1992, from 28% in 1960. Deficits had tripled as a percentage of gross domestic product over the prior two decades. Government debt was nearly 70% of GDP and growing rapidly. Interest payments on the debt took up 35 cents of every tax dollar.
Mr. Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, took decisive action. "Canadians have told us that they want the deficit brought down by reducing government spending, not by raising taxes, and we agree," Mr. Martin said. The new administration slashed spending. Unemployment benefits were cut by nearly 40%. The ratio of spending cuts to tax increases was nearly 7-to-1. Federal employment was reduced by 14%. Canada's national railway and air-traffic-control system were privatized.
The economy rebounded. Between 1995 and 1998, a $36.6 billion deficit turned into a $3 billion surplus. Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio was cut in half in a decade. Canada now has faster economic growth than America (3.3% in 2010, compared to 2.9% in the U.S.), a lower jobless rate (7.2% in June, when the U.S. rate was 9.2%), a deficit-to-GDP ratio that's a quarter of ours, and a stronger dollar...
online.wsj.com
Learning From Canada's Budget Triumph
David Henderson, Jerrod Anderson | Sep 30, 2010
Today, the United States faces a bleak fiscal situation: a large deficit, a huge amount of debt, and an uncertain economic outlook. The budget deficit for 2010 is projected to be 10 percent of GDP, and publicly held debt is projected to be 62 percent of GDP by the end of the year. In 1993, Canada was in a similar situation. Yet over the next 16 years, Canada was able to escape from chronic deficits and trimmed its debt from nearly 70 percent of GDP to 29 percent of GDP, all without sacrificing growth. The United States can replicate this by pursuing fiscal discipline, with heavy emphasis on spending cuts rather than tax increases, and by making changes in the responsibilities for congressional committees.
mercatus.org
Canada’s Budget Triumph
David Henderson | Sep 30, 2010
A federal government runs a large deficit. Deficits are so large that the ratio of federal debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) approaches 70 percent. A constituency of voters have gotten used to large federal spending programs. Does that sound like the United States? Well, yes. But it also describes Canada in 1993. Yet, just 16 years later, Canada’s federal debt had fallen from 67 percent to only 29 percent of GDP. Moreover, in every year between 1997 and 2008, Canada’s federal government had a budget surplus. In one fiscal year, 2000–2001, its surplus was a whopping 1.8 percent of GDP. If the U.S. government had such a surplus today, that would amount to a cool $263 billion rather than the current deficit of more than $1.5 trillion.
We often think of Canada as a more-socialist and higher-tax country than the United States, and for good reason: to some extent it’s true. For instance, Canada has a single-payer health care system, no private universities, and a five-percent federal tax on goods and services. So, what happened? How did the Canadian government do it? You might think that the Canadian government achieved the budget surplus by 2000–2001 with major increases in taxes, but it didn’t. Part of the fiscal improvement was due to high economic growth. But economic growth is, in part, a result of policy, not a policy itself.
The main policy actions that the Canadian government took to shrink its budget deficit and turn deficits into surpluses were cuts in government spending.Moreover, the Canadian government didn’t just cut the growth rate of spending, a favorite trick of U.S. politicians who want to claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism. It also cut absolute spending on many programs in dollar terms. And because the inflation rate in Canada, though low, was greater than zero over the whole time period, these cuts in dollar terms were even larger in inflation-adjusted dollars.
There are two morals of this story. First, the Canadian experience shows us that a large budget deficit can be turned into a budget surplus with ten years of fiscal discipline, mainly with spending cuts. It can happen here in the United States. We do not have to accept the idea that we have only two grim choices: living with huge budget deficits and a federal debt that both increase as a percent of GDP, or accepting our current spending but reducing the budget deficit with major tax increases.
The second moral of the story is that the Canadian experience does not support the Keynesian view that policymakers should not cut government spending during an economic slowdown. The Canadian experience, just like the U.S. experience during the 1920–21 recession and in the first two years following World War II, shows that cutting government spending even during low-growth years can be good for long-term economic results.
Following is the story of how Canada achieved fiscal discipline, turned a budget deficit into a surplus, and in the process became one of the healthiest economies in the G-7.
mercatus.org
And Canada passed us here heritage.org they are now 6th, while the US is 10th. |
