Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think that, in a way, the balanced budget amendments that have been proposed in my lifetime have always been equivalent to that. They weren’t saying that you could never run a deficit at any point in time. They were saying if you wanted to run a deficit, you had to pass some special resolution and get it passed through a two-thirds or three-fourths majority. I think that’s a classic example of something that would be very wise. But those seemed completely irrelevant, right? Deficits have just ballooned, and those constraints seem not to matter. Finland has a two-thirds rule, I think, for tax increases. They have very high taxes. Isn’t it just ultimately about culture and the will of the voters? Public opinion seeps through the system, no matter what constraints you put on the voting system within the government? Yeah, that’s the best comeback to all of this, right? That the voters ultimately have sovereign power in anything that’s even sort of like a democracy. So any of these rules we impose are second order compared to who your voters actually are. But it does appear that across the US states, balanced budget amendments seem to work. The will of the voters can’t be held back. It’s basically one dike that can hold back the tide just a little bit.…

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