My hero Milton Friedman was a big supporter of the Balanced Budget Amendment and in an article on this subject in 1983 he wrote:
“The key problem is not deficits but the size of government spending. […] I have never supported an amendment directed solely at a balanced budget. I have written repeatedly that while I would prefer that the budget be balanced, I would rather have government spend $500 billion and run a deficit of $100 billion than have it spend $800 billion with a balanced budget. It matters greatly how the budget is balanced, whether by cutting spending or by raising taxes.”
As a member of the Conservative Action Project, CEO Susan Carleson and leaders of 28 other organizations, representing a broad cross section of the conservative movement, are united in supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment that actually reins in national spending and increasing our national debt – without raising taxes.
MEMO FOR THE MOVEMENT: A Balanced Budget Amendment — in addition to balancing the budget — should make it difficult to raise taxes, tough to increase the debt, and prohibit any court from ordering a tax increase or deciding budget priorities.
“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1798
RE: In accordance with the Budget Control Act of 2011, sometime between October 1 and December 31, 2011 both houses of Congress must vote on a balanced budget amendment (BBA) to the U.S. Constitution. It is important that any such amendment must protect taxpayers by not forcing automatic tax increases to keep revenues in line with rising expenditures. Our fiscal problems are caused not by under taxation–but by over-spending.
ISSUE-IN-BRIEF: Not all balanced budget Amendments were created equal. The most comprehensive BBA proposed is S.J. Resolution 10 co-sponsored by all 47 Republican members of the United States Senate. It caps spending at 18% of GDP; requires a 2/3 vote of congress to raise taxes; requires a 3/5 vote of congress to increase the debt ceiling; and prohibits any court from ordering an increase in taxes. Proposed BBA’s that do less can have the unintended effect of managing a tax increase instead of limiting spending and would be counter-productive and must be opposed.
A STRONG BBA MUST BE EASY TO UNDERSTAND AND NOT HAVE LOOPHOLES:
Require a Balanced Budget every year: The federal debt is on track to consume our country’s entire Gross Domestic Product. The BBA would force Washington to live within its means.
Prohibit Perpetual Deficit Spending: Deficit spending is a tax on future earnings.
A debt ceiling will actually be a ceiling: The debt ceiling has been raised 11 times in the past decade. S.J. 10–co-sponsored by 47 members of the U.S. Senate– would require a three-fifths majority in both chambers to raise the debt ceiling. This is also an important provision to prevent cheating and other budget gimmicks because actual spending cannot exceed actual revenue for long without hitting the debt limit.
Congress may waive BBA requirement by simple majority if a declaration of war is in effect; and it would require a three-fifths majority to waive if the country is engaged in a military conflict that causes an imminent and serious military threat to our national security.
Courts setting any budget priorities would be a problem. Court-ordered military cuts or activist “declaratory judgments” requiring increased welfare spending would also be intolerable. S.J. 10 can be improved with an explicit ban on courts exercising jurisdiction on any of these essential political questions.
A “Weak” BBA will increase the size of Government and pave the way for Tax Increases:
Unlike other proposals, such as a “Weak” BBA, not only should a BBA have a supermajority requirement to raise taxes, there should be no loopholes for creative accounting.
Without a limitation on tax increases and a specific prohibition on courts ordering revenue increases a “Weak” BBA would allow judges the power to implement higher taxes to bring the budget into balance.
A “Weak” BBA would allow a simple majority of Members of Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling and continue to borrow against future generations. That’s why there is a three-fifths majority requirement to raise the debt ceiling in S.J. 10
Why the Tax Hike Limitation Component is Important to any BBA:
“The key problem is not deficits but the size of government spending. […] I have never supported an amendment directed solely at a balanced budget. I have written repeatedly that while I would prefer that the budget be balanced, I would rather have government spend $500 billion and run a deficit of $100 billion than have it spend $800 billion with a balanced budget. It matters greatly how the budget is balanced, whether by cutting spending or by raising taxes.”
Americans Support a Balanced Budget Amendment:
Americans have always overwhelmingly support a balanced budget amendment. A Fox News poll (June 30), shows support is 72-20.
On Message, Inc., on behalf of Let Freedom Ring, shows 81% of the American people (including 74% of Democrats) support Congress balancing their budget every year. In addition 66% of Americans favor capping federal spending at the historically average 18% of GDP.
“Of course, the best way to permanently reduce spending would be to enact a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution requiring a supermajority in both houses of Congress to run an annual deficit, raise tax rates, or increase the debit ceiling.”
James A. Baker III, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1985-1988
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
Ronald Reagan was a firm believer in the Balanced Budget Amendment and Milton Friedman was a key advisor to Reagan. Friedman’s 1980 film series taught the lesson of restraining growth of the federal budget.
Vital changes needed to keep road to further reforms open
There is a problem brewing in the House of Representatives of which most conservatives in and outside Congress are largely unaware. It has to do with H.J. Res. 1 – the balanced budget amendment – soon to be voted on per the debt-ceiling “deal” struck by Congress and the president. While H.J. Res. 1 is a solid first effort – and we have urged support for it as a symbolic vote – it is possibly fatally flawed and should be revised.
After years of indifference to constitutional fiscal discipline, Congress is once again stirring. In 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan, convened a federal amendment drafting committee led by Milton Friedman, Jim Buchanan, Bill Niskanen, Walter Williams and many others, and fashioned Senate Joint Resolution 58, a tax limitation-balanced budget amendment, which garnered 67 votes in the Senate under the able leadership of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican. After a successful discharge petition forced a House vote, the amendment failed to achieve the two-thirds vote necessary in a Tip O’Neill-Jim Wright-controlled House. In 1996, Newt Gingrich and company came within one vote of passing a fiscal amendment in the House.
Currently, H.J. Res. 1 is designed as a classic balanced budget amendment in which outlays can be as great as, but no more than, receipts for that year. However, it requires an estimate of receipts, which is notoriously faulty, and it does not necessarily produce surpluses with which to pay down our massive debt. Furthermore, it contains a second limit on outlays – “not more than 18 percent of the economic output of the United States” – without defining such output or resolving the inevitable conflict between the outlay calculations in the two provisions.
This could be fixed by restructuring the amendment as a spending or outlay limit based on prior year receipts or outlays (known numbers), adjusted only for inflation and population changes. This will produce surpluses in most years with which to pay down debts and will reduce government spending as a share of gross domestic product over time, right-sizing government and increasing the rate of economic growth for the benefit of all citizens, especially those least able to compete.
Section 4 of H.J. Res. 1 might best be described as a supreme example of the law of unintended consequences. This section imposes on the president a constitutional responsibility to present a balanced budget. Surely, the drafters were saying to themselves “We’ll fix that guy in the White House. Now he will have to fess up and either propose specific tax increases or specific spending cuts. He won’t be able to duck reality any longer.” The only problem is that this section is at odds with our Constitution in that it gives the president a constitutional power over fiscal matters never intended by the Founders.
For much of our history, the president did not propose a budget. In the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which established the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office, the president was statutorily authorized to propose a budget. Presidents have always shaped the budget and spending using their negotiating opportunities and veto pen. Wearing their chief administrator hat, earlier presidents sought to save money from the amounts appropriated by Congress, getting things done for less, impounding funds they did not think essential to spend. Congress‘ ceiling on an appropriation was not also the spending floor for the president, as it is now.
Section 4 appears to give the president co-equal power with Congress not only to present a budget but to shape it, in conflict with congressional budget authority. At a minimum, it is likely to create a conflict over the amount of allowed annual spending. The president surely will be guided by his own Office of Management and Budget, whose budget and receipts calculations will undoubtedly differ from the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers that will direct Congress. We should not start the budget process each year with this kind of conflict.
It would be better to restore the historic role of the president to impound and otherwise reduce expenditures by repealing and revising appropriate portions of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 so a fiscally conservative president is a revitalized partner in cutting the size of government.
Section 5 requires a supermajority vote for “a bill to increase revenues.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with making tax increases more difficult, this language is troublesome because it requires some government bureaucrat or bureaucracy to make a calculation or estimate of the effect of tax law changes on revenues. Proponents of a bill to increase cash flow to the government will argue that their tax law changes are “revenue neutral” and will likely persuade the Joint Committee on Taxation or Congressional Budget Office to back them up. Once again, estimators would be in control.
If we ever expect to convert our income-based tax system to a consumption tax, better not to require a two-thirds vote as liberals will use such a supermajority voting rule to stymie tax system reform.
There are other issues, as well, with debt limit and national emergency supermajority votes and definitions. While this balanced budget amendment – H.J. Res. 1 – has deserved a “yes” vote as a demonstration of commitment to constitutional fiscal discipline, it can and must be revised before the showdown vote in the House this fall.
Lewis K. Uhler is president of the National Tax Limitation Committee.
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
This week, House Republican freshmen Members held a press conference to discuss the importance of passing a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution and how now is the time for a permanent solution to our nation’s spending-driven debt crisis. We need a balanced budget amendment to ensure a prosperous future for our children and grandchildren. It’s the right thing to do.
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President Obama c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Over and over in the past Milton Friedman pleaded for restraint in our federal spending. Below you will see a fine article supporting the Balanced Budget Amendment and it points out that Friedman favored this mechanism to control our spending.
The question is how to solve our problem of unsustainable debt.
The United States of America is on the road to bankruptcy, with a federal debt of more than $14.2 trillion, almost half of which is owned by foreign countries. (Communist China alone owns fully a quarter of the foreign-held portion). The problem is so well known that it almost came as an anticlimax when Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded U.S. debt from its coveted AAA rating to an unheard-of AA+. As for the budget deficit, it is expected to total $1.3 trillion for this year alone, with tax revenues of about $2.3 trillion and total expenditures of about $3.6 trillion. If a household ran its budget like that, we would say it was headed for a rude shock.
Making matters worse is that our debt is structural rather than cyclical: the federal budget is in deficit both in good economic times and bad. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, the gross federal debt was $5.76 trillion. When he left eight years later, the debt was up to $10.626 trillion, an increase of $607 billion a year. During Barack Obama’s presidency it has risen by $1.7 trillion a year and now almost 40 percent higher than when he took office. Deficits of this size are quite simply unsustainable.
The only way to fix this mess is to radically cut federal spending, cap the budget with pay-as-you-go spending rules, and then enact a balanced budget amendment (BBA).
The most important point is that we need to cut spending, not raise taxes. Total federal spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has skyrocketed from around 18 percent, when George W. Bush became president, to more than 25 percent today. This shows that our current deficit problem is entirely due to overspending. If tomorrow we cut spending back to the levels of January 20, 2001, when Bush took office, the deficit would almost disappear.
Then we need to cap and balance the budget, once we’ve cut overall spending back to 2001 levels. To do this effectively, we need to enact a federal BBA to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment should have several features.
First, it should require that the president submit to Congress each year a balanced federal budget with no fiscal gimmicks. Presidential failure to do so would be an impeachable offense. Congress should be constitutionally required to hold a vote in both houses on the president’s proposed budget within three months, with the president and Congress having up to six months to adopt a final budget in any given calendar year (this requirement should be waivable during any time of declared war for up to two years). If they fail to do that, all federal spending except for payments on the debt should be frozen at levels 10 percent lower than in the preceding fiscal year. To help impose this, any one of the several states should have standing to sue in the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction for enforcement of this requirement.
Second, the BBA should cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP. A spending cap of this proportion would keep the federal government at the size it was under President Bill Clinton — hardly onerous or severe. The amendment should require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress to enact any new taxes or to raise tax rates. Votes to raise the national debt limit should also require a two-thirds majority. These provisions are essential to prevent a BBA from becoming just an excuse to raise taxes.
THE USUAL RESPONSE to calls for such an amendment is that we ought not tamper with the Constitution. Critics of a BBA also claim it is not needed since a majority of Congress could balance the budget today if it really wanted to. There are at least five reasons why those critics are dead wrong.
First, it is a core principle of American constitutionalism that there be no taxation without representation. The American Revolution was fought in part to prevent taxation by a British Parliament in which Americans were not represented. When Congress borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends, as it is doing today, it passes the burden of paying for current spending on to our children and grandchildren who cannot vote right now — nothing less than taxation without representation.
Second, a core purpose of the Constitution is to protect fundamental principles like freedom of speech and of the press from being whittled away during moments of legislative passion. Exactly the same argument holds true with respect to spending more money than the government collects in tax revenue. Constitutionalizing the balanced budget requirement is as necessary as constitutionalizing the protection of freedom of speech and of the press. This is an argument that was first made more than 30 years ago by Noble Prize laureate Milton Friedman. It is just as true today as it was then.
Third, there is an economic reason why it is easier to assemble lobbies for government spending than it is to assemble a nationwide lobby for a balanced budget. Consider the farm lobby that argues for agricultural price supports, or the AARP that lobbies for benefits for the elderly. It is cheaper and easier for small groups with a shared common interest to lobby Congress than for a large, diffuse majority of the American population to do the same. That’s why the silent majority is silent. A BBA in the Constitution would prevent the special interests from ripping off the children and grandchildren of the silent majority. James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 51 that the secret of constitutional government was to make ambition counteract ambition. The way to check and balance over-spending is to constitutionalize a pay-as-you-go rule while making tax increases hard to enact.
Fourth, yet another economic reason for a BBA is that it would reduce risk and thereby promote investment. When people are looking for a place to invest, one of their first questions is how risky is the investment and how large is the potential reward. Foreign and American investors since World War II have invested in the U.S. and in its debt because our Constitution of checks and balances makes it hard to do crazy things like nationalize industries or set up a single payer health insurance monopoly.
A BBA would reduce further the risk of investing in the U. S., and that would promote investment and economic growth by constitutionally committing itself not to overspend. The risk of inflationary devaluation of the dollar would thus go way down. This in turn would bolster the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It would also prevent federal borrowing from crowding out private sector borrowing in the U.S. This would free up a capital for investment in job-creating ventures.
A fifth argument for the BBA paradoxically grows out of one of the arguments commonly made against it: it would be purely symbolic. Or as James Madison would have said, “a mere parchment barrier” against overspending.
This criticism fails for many reasons. A BBA of the kind I argue for would have enforcement teeth. Presidential failure to submit a good-faith balanced budget would be a specific ground for impeachment. Then too, if Congress failed to enact a balanced budget, state governments could sue for an across theboard spending cut of 10 percent.
But suppose Congress wimps out and enacts a BBA without teeth. Would such a symbolic victory be worth anything? The answer again is clearly yes. Almost every state has some form of a balanced budget requirement in its constitution or law. The fact is that balanced budget requirements actually do work at the state level. This strongly suggests they would work at the federal level as well.
CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS, even symbolic ones, set the agenda of political debate. The Second and Tenth Amendments clearly do that in the U.S. today, even though the federal courts almost never enforce them. A BBA would work very much the same way.
The case for a BBA is so powerful that Germany and Switzerland — both models of fiscal sobriety — actually require a balanced budget in their own constitutions. And now Germany and France have actually proposed requiring that all Eurozone countries amend their national constitutions to require a balanced budget. What is good enough for almost every state in the Union and for many countries of Europe is certainly worth trying at the federal level here.
So what harm could come from enacting a BBA to the U.S. Constitution? Is there any argument against such an amendment that outweighs the arguments in favor of it?
One concern conservatives have is that it might lead to tax increases. I share that concern and therefore would couple it with a super-majority requirement for tax increases. That should make a BBA clearly appealing to conservatives of all stripes. But what if such an amendment gets ratified that does not protect against tax increases? Would we then be worse off?
I think the answer is no. It is harder politically for Congress to tax real people living today than it is to borrow money from the children and grandchildren of the silent majority. People living today will mobilize in many ways against tax increases. The correct solution is to cut, cap, and balance, but I would not let concerns about tax increases stop us from doing what virtually every state constitution does.
Another real concern for conservatives is that a BBA could lead to dangerous cuts in spending on national defense. This concern I share. The U.S. is a world leader and the greatest force for liberty and economic opportunity in history. We must always be ready to defend liberty worldwide.
The problem is, however, that current levels of deficit spending — almost half of which is financed by foreign countries — is itself a threat to U.S. global might. We simply cannot defend liberty in Asia, for example, if we continue to borrow massively from the Chinese. We cannot defend freedom in Arab countries while being so dependent on Saudi Arabia and others for imported oil and purchases of our debt. The status quo is at least as threatening to America’s military might as is living under a BBA, for the status quo is not sustainable.
Finally, some conservatives argue that the solution to congressional deficit spending is a line item veto amendment giving the president the same power over spending enjoyed by a majority of state governors. I am quite skeptical about such an amendment because of the enormous power it would shift from Congress to the president. Imagine for a moment that President Obama could threaten senators or representatives with line item vetoes of locally important spending projects unless they voted his way on socialized medicine. Or on a card check law reform making it easy to fraudulently form a union. Do we really want to cede that much power from Congress to the president? I do not think so.
In sum, we need to cut, cap, and balance. To do that permanently, we must enact a BBA. Nothing less than the future of government of the people, by the people, and for the people is at stake.
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
Mark Levin “I feel that we can do great things.” Mark is excited by the proposed Balanced Budget Amendment. He states that this would be a great thing for America to pass. He believes the Balanced Budget Amendment will help bring the nation back to it’s Constitutional roots. Mark explains what the amendment is and how it will work. In his February 1983 classic essay, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman gives his opinion on a balanced budget amendment that requires a super majority to raise taxes. Friedman states, “The purpose of the balanced-budget-and-tax-limitation amendment is to limit the government in order to free the people—this time from excessive taxation. Its passage would go a long way to remedy the defect that has developed in our budgetary process.” Part #1 3-25-2011
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President Obama c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
The best article I have ever read on the Balanced Budget Amendment was written by my favorite economist Milton Friedman. Here is the second portion below:
I have been much more surprised, and dismayed, by the criticism that has been expressed by persons who share my basic outlook about the importance of limiting government in order to preserve and expand individual freedom—for example, the editors of The Wall Street Journal and a former editor and current columnist, Vermont Royster. They do not question the objectives of the amendment, but they doubt its necessity and potential effectiveness.
Those doubts are presumably shared by many other thoughtful citizens of all shades of political opinion who are united by concern about the growth of government spending and deficits. Here, for their consideration, are my answers to the principal objections to the proposed amendment that I have come across, other than those that arise from a desire to have a still-bigger government:
1. The amendment is unnecessary. Congress and the President have the power to limit spending and balance the budget.
Taken seriously, this is an argument for scrapping most of the Constitution. Congress and the President have the power to preserve freedom of the press and of speech without the First Amendment. Does that make the First Amendment unnecessary? Not surprisingly, I know of no one who has criticized the balanced-budget amendment as unnecessary—however caustic his comments on congressional hypocrisy—who would draw the conclusion that the First Amendment should be scrapped.
It is essential to look not only at the power of Congress but at the incentives of its members—to act in such a way as to be re-elected. As Phil Gramm, a Democratic congressman from Texas, has said: Every time you vote on every issue, all the people who want the program are looking over your right shoulder and nobody’s looking over your left shoulder….In being fiscally responsible under such circumstances, we’re asking more of people than the Lord asks.”
Under present arrangements, Congress will not in fact balance the budget. Similarly, a President will not produce a balanced budget by using the kind of vetoes that would be required. The function of the amendment is to remedy the defect in our legislative procedure that distorts the will of the people as it is filtered through their representatives. The amendment process is the only effective way the public can treat the budget as a whole. That is the function of the First Amendment, as well—it treats free speech as a bundle. In its absence, Congress would consider each case “on its merits.” It is not hard to envisage the way unpopular groups and views would fare.
2. The President and Congress are guilty of hypocrisy in voting simultaneously for a large current deficit and for a constitutional amendment to prevent future deficits.
Of course, I have long believed that congressional hypocrisy and shortsightedness are the only reasons there is a ghost of a chance of getting Congress to pass an amendment limiting itself. Most members of Congress will do anything to postpone the problems they face by a couple of years—only Wall Street has a shorter perspective. If the hypocrisy did not exist, if Congress behaved “responsibly,” there would be no need for the amendment. Congress’s irresponsibility is the reason we need an amendment and at the same time the reason that there is a chance of getting one.
Hypocrisy may eventually lead to the passing of the amendment. But hypocrisy will not prevent the amendment from having important effects three or four years down the line—and from casting its shadow on events even earlier. Congress will not violate the Constitution lightly. Members of Congress will wriggle and squirm; they will seek, and no doubt find, subterfuges and evasions. But their actions will be significantly affected by the existence of the amendment. The experience of several states that have passed similar tax-limitation amendments provides ample evidence of that.
3. The amendment is substantive, not procedural and the Constitution should be limited to procedural matters. The fate of the Prohibition amendment is a cautionary tale that should give us pause in enacting substantive amendments.
If this amendment is substantive, so is the income-tax (sixteenth) amendment and so are many specific provisions of the Constitution. The income-tax amendment does not specify the rate of tax. It leaves that to Congress. Similarly, this amendment does not specify the size of the budget. It simply outlines a procedure for approving it: the same as now exists if total legislated outlays do not exceed an amount determined by prior events (the prior budget and the prior growth in national income); and by a majority of 60 percent if total legislated outlays do exceed that amount. The requirement of a supernormal majority is neither substantive nor undemocratic nor unprecedented. Witness the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto or to approve a treaty.
The prohibition amendment was incompatible with the basic aim of the Constitution, because it was not directed at limiting government. On the contrary, it limited the people and freed government to control them. The balanced-budget-tax-limitation amendment is thoroughly compatible with the basic role of the Constitution, because it seeks to improve the ability of the public to limit government.
4. The amendment is unduly rigid because it requires an annually balanced budget.
This is a misconception. Section 1 of the amendment prohibits a planned budget deficit unless it is explicitly approved by three fifths of the members of the House and Senate. It further requires the Congress and the President to “ensure that actual outlays do not exceed the outlays set forth in [the budget] statement.” But it does not require that actual receipts equal or exceed statement receipts. A deficit that emerged because a recession produced a reduction in tax receipts would not be in violation of the amendment, provided that outlays were no greater than statement outlays. This is a sensible arrangement: outlays can be controlled more readily over short periods than receipts.
I have never been willing to support an amendment calling for an annually balanced budget. I do support this one, because it has the necessary flexibility.
5. The amendment will be ineffective because (a) it requires estimates of receipts and outlays which can be fudged; (b) its language is fuzzy; (c) the Congress can find loopholes to evade it; (d) it contains no specific provisions for enforcement.
(a) It will be possible to evade the amendment by overestimating receipts—but only once, for the first year the amendment is effective. Thereafter, section 2 of the amendment limits each year’s statement receipts to the prior year’s statement receipts plus the prior rate of increase of national income. No further estimates of budget receipts are called for. This is one of the overlooked subtleties in the amendment.
Any further fudging would have to be of the national-income estimates. That is possible but both unlikely and not easy. What matters is not the level of national income but the percentage change in national income. Alterations of the definition of national income that affect levels are likely to have far less effect on percentage changes. Moreover, making the change in income artificially high in one year will tend to make it artificially low the next. All in all, I do not believe that this is a serious problem.
(b) The language is not fuzzy. The only undefined technical term is “national income.” The amendment also refers to “receipts” and “outlays,” terms of long-standing usage in government accounting; in section 4, total receipts and total outlays are defined explicitly.
Nor is the amendment a hastily drawn gimmick designed to provide a fig leaf to hide Congress’s sins. On the contrary, it is a sophisticated product, developed over a period of years, that reflects the combined wisdom of the many persons who participated in its development.
(c) Loopholes are a more serious problem. One obvious loophole—off-budget outlays—has been closed by phrasing the amendment in terms of total outlays and defining them to include “all outlays of the United States except those for repayment of debt principal.” But other, less obvious, loopholes have not been closed. Two are particularly worrisome: government credit guarantees, and mandating private expenditures for public purposes (e. g., antipollution devices on automobiles). These loopholes now exist and are now being resorted to. I wish there were some way to close them. No doubt the amendment would provide an incentive to make greater use of them. Yet I find it hard to believe that they are such attractive alternatives to direct government spending that they would render the amendment useless.
(d) No constitutional provision will be enforced unless it has widespread public support. That has certainly been demonstrated. However, if a provision does have widespread support—as public-opinion polls have clearly shown that this one does—legislators are not likely to flout it, which brings us back to the loopholes.
Equally important, legislators will find it in their own interest to confer an aura of inviolability on the amendment. This point has been impressed on me by the experience of legislators in states that have adopted amendments limiting state spending. Prior to the amendments, they had no effective defense against lobbyists urging spending programs—all of them, of course, for good purposes. Now they do. They can say: Your program is an excellent one; I would like to support it, but the total amount we can spend is fixed. To get funds for your program, we shall have to cut elsewhere. Where should we cut?” The effect is to force lobbyists to compete against one another rather than form a coalition against the general taxpayer.
That is the purpose of constitutional rules: to establish arrangements under which private interest coincides with the public interest. This amendment passes that test with flying colors.
6. The key problem is not deficits but the size of government spending.
My sentiments exactly. Which is why I have never supported an amendment directed solely at a balanced budget. I have written repeatedly that while I would prefer that the budget be balanced, I would rather have government spend $500 billion and run a deficit of $100 billion than have it spend $800 billion with a balanced budget. It matters greatly how the budget is balanced, whether by cutting spending or by raising taxes.
In my eyes, the chief merit of the amendment recommended by the Senate Judiciary Committee is precisely that it does limit spending. Section 1 requires that statement outlays be no greater than statement receipts; section 2 limits the maximum increase in statement receipts; the two together effectively limit statement outlays. Moreover, if in any year Congress manages to keep statement receipts and outlays below the maximum level, the effect is to lower the maximum level for future years, thus fostering a gradual ratcheting down of spending relative to national income.
A further strength of the amendment is the provision for approving an exceptional increase in statement receipts (hence in statement outlays). The spending-limitation amendment that was drafted by the National Tax Limitation Committee required a two-thirds majority of both houses in order to justify an exceptional increase in outlays. The amendment passed by the Senate requires only “a majority of the whole number of both houses of Congress.” However, the majority must vote for an explicit tax increase. I submit that it is far easier to get a two-thirds majority of Congress to approve an exceptional increase in spending than to get a simple majority to approve an explicit increase in taxes. So this is a stronger, not a weaker, amendment.
Section 6 proposed by Senator Armstrong in the course of Senate debate, makes the debt ceiling permanent and requires a supermajority vote to raise it. That provision was approved by a narrow majority composed of a coalition of right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats—the one group demonstrating its hardcore conservatism, the other seeking to reduce the chances of adoption of the basic amendment.
I do not favor the debt-limit provision. Its objective—to strengthen pressure on Congress to balance the budget—is fine, and it may be that it would do little harm. But it seems to me both unnecessary and potentially harmful. I trust that it will be eliminated if and when the amendment is finally approved by Congress. I shall favor the amendment even if the debt-limit provision is left in, but less enthusiastically.
7. The amendment introduces a near economic theory into the Constitution.
It does nothing of the kind—unless the idea that there should be some connection between receipts and outlays is a new economic theory. The amendment does not even change the present budget process, if Congress enacts a balanced budget that rises by no greater a percentage than does national income. But it does significantly stiffen the requirement for passing a budget that is in deficit or for raising the fraction of our income spent on our behalf by the government.
The amendment recommended by the Senate Judiciary Committee deserves the wholehearted backing of every believer in a limited government and maximum freedom for the individual.
Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. He is the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
Mark Levin “I feel that we can do great things.” Mark is excited by the proposed Balanced Budget Amendment. He states that this would be a great thing for America to pass. He believes the Balanced Budget Amendment will help bring the nation back to it’s Constitutional roots. Mark explains what the amendment is and how it will work. In his February 1983 classic essay, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman gives his opinion on a balanced budget amendment that requires a super majority to raise taxes. Friedman states, “The purpose of the balanced-budget-and-tax-limitation amendment is to limit the government in order to free the people—this time from excessive taxation. Its passage would go a long way to remedy the defect that has developed in our budgetary process.” Part #1 3-25-2011
President Obama c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
The best article I have ever read on the Balanced Budget Amendment was written by my favorite economist Milton Friedman. Here is the first portion below:
An argument that the balanced-budget amendment would be a rare merging of public and private interests.
Our elected representatives in Congress have been voting larger expenditures year after year—larger not only in dollars but as a fraction of the national income. Tax revenue has been rising as well, but nothing like so rapidly. As a result, deficits have grown and grown.
At the same time, the public has demonstrated increasing resistance to higher spending, higher taxes, and higher deficits. Every survey of public opinion shows a large majority that believes that government is spending too much money, and that the government budget should be balanced.
How is it that a government of the majority produces results that the majority opposes?
The paradox reflects a defect in our political structure. We are ruled by a majority—but it is a majority composed of a coalition of minorities representing special interests. A particular minority may lose more from programs benefiting other minorities than it gains from programs benefiting itself. It might be willing to give up its own programs as part of a package deal eliminating all programs—but, currently, there is no way it can express that preference.
Similarly, it is not in the interest of a legislator to vote against a particular appropriation bill if that vote would create strong enemies while a vote in its favor would alienate few supporters. That is why simply electing the right people is not a solution. Each of us will be favorably inclined toward a legislator who has voted for a bill that confers a large benefit on us, as we perceive it. Yet who among us will oppose a legislator because he has voted for a measure that, while requiring a large expenditure, will increase the taxes on each of us by a few cents or a few dollars? When we are among the few who benefit, it pays us to keep track of the vote. When we are among the many who bear the cost, it does not pay us even to read about it.
The result is a major defect in the legislative procedure whereby a budget is enacted: each measure is considered separately, and the final budget is the sum of the separate items, limited by no effective, overriding total. That defect will not be remedied by Congress itself—as the failure of one attempt after another at reforming the budget process has demonstrated. It simply is not in the self-interest of legislators to remedy it—at least not as they have perceived their self-interest.
Dissatisfaction with ever-increasing spending and taxes first took the form of pressure on legislators to discipline themselves. When it became clear that they could not or would not do so, the dissatisfaction took the form of a drive for constitutional amendments at both the state and the federal levels. The drive captured national attention when Proposition 13, reducing property taxes, was passed in California; it has held public attention since, scoring successes in state after state. The constitutional route remains the only one by which the general interest of the public can be expressed, by which package deals, as it were, can be realized.
Two national organizations have led this drive: the National Tax Limitation Committee (NTLC), founded in 1975 as a single-issue, nonpartisan organization to serve as a clearinghouse for information on attempts to limit taxes at a local, state, or federal level, and to assist such attempts; and the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), which led the drive to persuade state legislatures to pass resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to enact an amendment requiring the federal government to balance its budget. Thirty-one states have already passed resolutions calling for a convention. If three more pass similar resolutions, the Constitution requires Congress to call such a convention—a major reason Congress has been active in producing its own amendment.
The amendment that was passed by the Senate last August 4, by a vote of 69 to 31 (two more than the two thirds required for approval of a constitutional amendment), had its origin in 1973 in a California proposition that failed at the time but passed in 1979 in improved form (not Proposition 13). A drafting committee organized by the NTLC produced a draft amendment applicable to the federal government in late 1978. The NTU contributed its own version. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a final version on May 19, 1981, after lengthy hearings and with the cooperation of all the major contributors to the earlier work. In my opinion, the committee’s final version was better than any earlier draft. That version was adopted by the Senate except for the addition of section 6, proposed by Senator William Armstrong, of Colorado, a Republican. Approval by the Senate, like the sponsorship of the amendment, was bipartisan: forty-seven Republicans, twenty-one Democrats, and one Independent voted for the amendment.
The House Democratic leadership tried to prevent a vote on the amendment in the House before last November’s elections. However, a discharge petition forced a vote on it on October 1, the last full day of the regular session. The amendment was approved by a majority (236 to 187), but not by the necessary two thirds. Again, the majority was bipartisan: 167 Republicans, 69 Democrats. In view of its near passage and the widespread public support for it, the amendment is sure to be reintroduced in the current session of Congress. Hence it remains a very live issue.
The amendment as adopted by the Senate would achieve two related objectives: first, it would increase the likelihood that the federal budget would be brought into balance, not by prohibiting an unbalanced budget but by making it more difficult to enact a budget calling for a deficit; second, it would check the growth of government spending—again, not by prohibiting such growth but by making it more difficult.
The amendment is very much in the spirit of the first ten amendments—the Bill of Rights. Their purpose was to limit the government in order to free the people. Similarly, the purpose of the balanced-budget-and-tax-limitation amendment is to limit the government in order to free the people—this time from excessive taxation. Its passage would go a long way to remedy the defect that has developed in our budgetary process. By the same token, it would make it more difficult for supporters of ever-bigger government to attain their goals.
It is no surprise, therefore, that a torrent of criticism has been loosed against the proposed amendment by people who believe that our problems arise not from excessive government but from our failure to give government enough power, enough control over us as individuals. It is no surprise that Tip O’Neill and his fellow advocates of big government tried to prevent a vote in the House on the amendment, and used all the pressure at their command to prevent its receiving a two-thirds majority.
It is no surprise, either, that when the amendment did come to a vote in the House, a substantial majority voted for it. After all, in repeated opinion polls, more than three quarters of the public have favored such an amendment. Their representatives do not find it easy to disregard that sentiment in an open vote—which is why Democratic leaders tried to prevent the amendment from coming to a vote. When their hand was forced, they quickly introduced a meaningless substitute that was overwhelmingly defeated (346 to 77) but gave some representatives an opportunity to cast a recorded vote for a token budget-balancing amendment while at the same time voting against the real thing.
Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. He is the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
_________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
Mark Levin interviews Senator Hatch 1/27/2011 about the balanced budget amendment. Mark is very excited about the balanced budget amendment being proposed by Senator Orin Hatch and John Cornyn and he discusses the amendment with Senator Hatch. Senator Hatch explains the bill it’s ramifications and limitations. Senator Hatch actually worked on this bill with renowned economist Milton Friedman. This ammendment is the first big step in saving our country.
_________________
President Obama c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
I really wish we would restraint the growth of the federal budget and the only way to do that is to pass the Balanced Budget Amendment. My favorite economist was Milton Friedman and he discusses that below:
Yesterday, I did a twenty minute interview by phone with Milton Friedman. Of course, Mr. Friedman has an INCREDIBLE resume. He won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, won the “Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 and received the National Medal of Science the same year”.
He was also an “economic adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964, to Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign, to President Nixon subsequently, and to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign.”
There is much, much, more I could add. But I think the fact that Mr. Friedman finished in a tie for the 15 slot when RWN had conservative bloggers select, “The Greatest Figures Of The 20th Century gives you some idea of Mr. Friedman’s stature.
Enjoy the interview!
John Hawkins:Slate’s Chris Suellentrop has pointed out that Howard Dean has said “that he would demand that other countries adopt the exact same labor, environmental, health, and safety standards as the United States” if they wanted trade agreements with us (Dean said something similar to the WAPO). If that policy were ever implemented, what sort of damage do you think it would cause to the US economy?
Milton Friedman: I think it would cause immense damage, not to the US economy, but to other economies around the world — much more to the others than to us.
John Hawkins: Really? So you don’t really think it would hurt the US economy that much?
Milton Friedman: It would hurt the US economy, but it would be disastrous for the countries that are smaller than we are. World trade depends on differences among countries, not similarities. Different countries are in different stages of development. It is appropriate for them to have different patterns, different policies for ecology, labor standards, and so forth.
From my point of view, we in the United States have gone overboard in respect to the extent of regulation and detailed control of labor standards, industry, and the like. It’s bad for us, but fortunately we had two hundred years of relatively free development to provide a strong basis to sustain the cost. But to impose this on other countries that are not at that stage would be a disgraceful thing to do.
John Hawkins: Because it would keep them from ever getting to the point we’re at?
Milton Friedman: That’s right.
John Hawkins: Do you think George Bush, with the economy being as it was, did the right thing by cutting taxes?
Milton Friedman: I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. The question is, “How do you hold down government spending?” Government spending now amounts to close to 40% of national income not counting indirect spending through regulation and the like. If you include that, you get up to roughly half. The real danger we face is that number will creep up and up and up. The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes.
John Hawkins: Now let me ask you about that. In the Reagan years, we cut taxes and it ended up leading to economic growth which increased the amount of revenue that came into the government.
Milton Friedman: Well, economic growth will inevitably increase the amount of revenue coming into the government. But so far as the Reagan years were concerned, we have to be careful there. There were initial cuts in 1981-1982 and then there was a very good income tax law in 1986. But in between that, there were increases in taxes as well. So it’s not an entirely clear picture that you can attribute the growth in revenue entirely to the tax reductions. But it’s a hard thing to disentangle the effects of several things happening at the same time. In particular, there’s no doubt that growth is very favorable to government revenue.
John Hawkins: Well let me ask you a related question about holding down the deficit. Really, I’m not seeing much political will on either side of the aisle to hold down costs. Do you think we should consider a Balanced Budget Amendment?
Milton Friedman: What we should consider and what has been considered is a Tax And Spending Limitation Amendment, an amendment to hold down total spending. I don’t think it needs to be in the form of a Balanced Budget Amendment, but that’s one form it can take.
John Hawkins: So would you favor for example a 3/5th’s majority to raise taxes like they suggested in the “Contract with America”?
Milton Friedman: Yes, but the example that comes to mind really is the Colorado Tax And Expenditure Limitation Amendment that requires the spending to increase no more from year to year than population and inflation. Also, it requires that any revenues in excess of spending have to be returned to the taxpayers.
__________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
In the last 20 minutes of this video below you can see Jim Demint’s speech and you will notice that he quotes Milton Friedman.
CPAC 2013 – Presidential Dinner sponsored by Newsmax feat. Jim DeMint
Published on Mar 15, 2013
Presidential Dinner sponsored by Newsmax featuring The Heritage Foundation’s President-elect Jim DeMint, Dana Loesch, and entertainment by Lee Greenwood/
Milton Friedman: Make Politically Profitable For Wrong People To Do Right Thing
Published on Feb 22, 2013
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.
In the last 20 minutes of this video below you can see Jim Demint’s speech and you will notice that he quotes Milton Friedman. CPAC 2013 – Presidential Dinner sponsored by Newsmax feat. Jim DeMint Published on Mar 15, 2013 Presidential Dinner sponsored by Newsmax featuring The Heritage Foundation’s President-elect Jim DeMint, Dana Loesch, […]
What a great man Milton Friedman was. The Legacy of Milton Friedman November 18, 2006 Alexander Tabarrok Great economist by day and crusading public intellectual by night, Milton Friedman was my hero. Friedman’s contributions to economics are profound, the permanent income hypothesis, the resurrection of the quantity theory of money, and his magnum opus with […]
Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
Milton Friedman at Hillsdale College 2006 July 2006 Free to Choose: A Conversation with Milton Friedman Milton Friedman Economist Milton Friedman is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946-1976. Dr. Friedman received the Nobel Memorial […]
Stearns Speaks on House Floor in Support of Balanced Budget Amendment Uploaded by RepCliffStearns on Nov 18, 2011 Speaking on House floor in support of Balanced Budget Resolution, 11/18/2011 ___________ Below are some of the main proposals of Milton Friedman. I highly respected his work. David J. Theroux said this about Milton Friedman’s view concerning […]
Milton Friedman at Hillsdale College 2006 July 2006 Free to Choose: A Conversation with Milton Friedman Milton Friedman Economist Milton Friedman is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946-1976. Dr. Friedman received the Nobel Memorial […]
The Machine: The Truth Behind Teachers Unions Published on Sep 4, 2012 by ReasonTV America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children. That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over […]
Great economist by day and crusading public intellectual by night, Milton Friedman was my hero. Friedman’s contributions to economics are profound, the permanent income hypothesis, the resurrection of the quantity theory of money, and his magnum opus with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, all stand as great achievements.
It’s true that in the pantheon of great twentieth century economists others hold their rightful place, Keynes was more revolutionary, Arrow more innovative and Samuelson more prolific but more than any other economist of the twentieth century Friedman was right. Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena? Obvious now but in Friedman’s time this was a battle cry. It was a battle Friedman won. Central bankers today are punished for high inflation rates and as a result inflation has disappeared as an economic problem in advanced economies. Fine tuning of the economy? Friedman was skeptical and while short-term monetary and fiscal policy have not been abandoned there is a much greater appreciation today that these tools are limited and error-prone. Moreover, Friedman’s focus on monetary rules and monetary stability, echoed by Nobelist James Buchanan’s focus on fiscal rules and fiscal stability, are now seen as important foundations for long-run economic growth not to be sacrificed at a moment’s notice.
On the biggest question of all, free markets or a command economy Friedman was of course resoundingly correct. Obvious? Not to as great an economist as Paul Samuelson who in his textbook repeatedly predicted that the Soviet Union would outgrow the United States!
But Friedman did not restrict his genius to the academy or even to his field of monetary economics, he used economics to forcefully argue for a better world. Friedman was a key player in ending the draft, he used the power of the Nobel prize to champion unpopular causes like drug legalization. He not only wrote about floating exchange rates he helped to bring them into being. The end of welfare as we know it? Friedman’s negative income tax was an inspiration.
To those of us who admired Friedman, we mark his death not simply to praise his past accomplishments but because we have lost a leader. Even at 94, Friedman was sharp, active and crusading. In his last decade he devoted considerable efforts to promoting school choice. In this respect, I think Friedman’s influence has not peaked and on that day when every child in the United States has a voucher good at any school, anywhere, when schools compete for students, and a thriving and innovative market in education is born then too we will praise Milton Friedman.
Milton Friedman loved liberty. Even today, chills run down my spine whenever I read the slashing opening to Capitalism and Freedom:
President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country….” Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.
Damn right.
On a personal note, Friedman inspired my book, Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science, in which I said Milton Friedman was the greatest entrepreneurial economist of the twentieth century. It was thus a real thrill for me and a bringing around of the circle when I sent him a draft and he wrote back praising the book (see the back cover!).
Alexander Tabarrok is Research Director for The Independent Institute, Assistant Editor of The Independent Review, and Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, and he has taught at the University of Virginia and Ball State University. Dr. Tabarrok is the editor of The Independent Institute books, Entrepreneurial Economics (Oxford University Press), The Voluntary City (with David Beito and Peter Gordon, University of Michigan Press), and Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime.
Milton Friedman on the American Economy (4 of 6) Uploaded by donotswallow on Aug 9, 2009 THE OPEN MIND Host: Richard D. Heffner Guest: Milton Friedman Title: A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy VTR: 5/31/77 _____________________________________ Below is a transcipt from a portion of an interview that Milton Friedman gave on 5-31-77: Friedman: […]
Milton Friedman’s negative income tax explained by Friedman in 1968: We need to cut back on the Food Stamp program and not try to increase it. What really upsets me is that when the government gets involved in welfare there is a welfare trap created for those who become dependent on the program. Once they […]
Milton Friedman on the American Economy (3 of 6) Uploaded by donotswallow on Aug 9, 2009 THE OPEN MIND Host: Richard D. Heffner Guest: Milton Friedman Title: A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy VTR: 5/31/77 _____________________________________ Below is a transcipt from a portion of an interview that Milton Friedman gave on 5-31-77: Friedman: Now […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 4-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman on the American Economy (2 of 6) Uploaded by donotswallow on Aug 9, 2009 THE OPEN MIND Host: Richard D. Heffner Guest: Milton Friedman Title: A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy VTR: 5/31/77 _____________________________________ Below is a transcipt from a portion of an interview that Milton Friedman gave on 5-31-77: Friedman: General […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 3-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman on the American Economy (1 of 6) Uploaded by donotswallow on Aug 9, 2009 THE OPEN MIND Host: Richard D. Heffner Guest: Milton Friedman Title: A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy VTR: 5/31/77 _____________________________________ Below is a transcipt from a portion of an interview that Milton Friedman gave on 5-31-77: THE OPEN […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 1-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman – Public Housing Uploaded by LibertyPen on May 6, 2011 Professor Friedman looks at the destination of another road paved with good intentions. _______________ 10 great quotes from Milton Friedman below: Nov 29, 2011 10 Of The Best Economics Quotes From Milton Friedman John Hawkins John Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs […]
Myth:Conservative Herbert Hoover responsible for Depression When I grew up I always heard that the conservative Herbert Hoover was responsible for the depression. Is that true? The Hoover Myth Marches On Posted by David Boaz In the New York Times today, columnist Joseph Nocera quotes a book published in 1940 on Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression: […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman – Redistribution of Wealth Uploaded by LibertyPen on Feb 12, 2010 Milton Friedman clears up misconceptions about wealth redistribution, in general, and inheritance tax, in particular. http://www.LibertyPen.com _______________________________ Many times in the past our government has tried to even the playing field but the rich and poor will always be with us as […]
Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences grades the achievements of the Clinton administration and evaluates the programs the President proposed in his 1999 State of the Union address.
ROBINSON Just the last eight years, or would you give high marks to Volcker as well, Greenspan’s predecessor?
FRIEDMAN That’s an interesting case, because you have to give the credit there really to Reagan. There’s no other President who would have stood by while the Fed followed the policy it did. If you remember— you don’t remember that period but if you go back…
ROBINSON I do actually, I had just started at the White House in those days…
FRIEDMAN …if you go back to that period, stopping the inflation that was raging which reached double-digit levels at the end of the ’70s and early ’80s required stepping on the brakes hard and produced a recession. And if you remember, Reagan’s popular ranking went way down in…
ROBINSON Down into the thirties.
FRIEDMAN …thirties, right. No other President would have stood by and said to the Fed, keep doing what you’re doing, you’re doing the right thing. But Reagan did do that. And that’s what enabled Volcker to do what Volcker did.
ROBINSON Back to the present to find out what Milton Friedman thinks of President Clinton’s legislative goals for the rest of his term.
THE SUNSHINE PLOYS
ROBINSON Let me ask you to apply your thinking to the principle points of Bill Clinton’s program for the remaining couple of years in office. The President’s program is intended— we’ll take old folks first— to, I quote now, “Address the challenge of a senior boom by using the budget surplus to help save Social Security.”
FRIEDMAN Well, the proposal, if you look at it in detail, is a complete fake.
ROBINSON A complete fake?
FRIEDMAN Absolutely.
ROBINSON He wants to take sixty percent— a little more than sixty percent of budget surplus over the next fifteen years…
FRIEDMAN Where does that come from? He’s counting that twice. That comes from the proceeds of the payroll taxes that are now in, which, in principle, though not in practice, are supposed to be used for Social Security, but which have indeed been financing every regular event. If he doesn’t do a thing about the surplus, that would still end up in bonds in the hands of the Social Security so-called Trust Fund.
ROBINSON You say he’s guilty of a little bit of a flim-flam game with the books.
FRIEDMAN Absolutely.
ROBINSON Within forty-eight hours of that State of the Union Address in which he made this proposal, Alan Greenspan, whom you have just praised, endorsed the proposal— in general terms, not specific terms, but he endorsed the proposal— and the Republicans in Congress said yep, that’s a good idea, sign us up for that too. How is it that he’s able to get everybody to go for what you call a flim-flam game?
FRIEDMAN Look, do you need to ask that question now after six years of Clinton? How he’s been able to get one flim-flam game after another. How he’s been able to bamboozle the people into thinking that he deserves higher ratings because he lies. Clinton is a superb politician who has a most extraordinary capacity to exude sincerity. He’s an incredible phenomenon. I think he’s a genius. But go back to the Social Security program. The first thing to be said is that all this nonsense about saving something for Social Security is pure fiction. It’s wrong to think that what people are paying into Social Security, what people are paying in the form of wage taxes, is what they’re paying for their own security. [
ROBINSON That’s nonsense.] There is no relationship whatsoever. We have a system under which you have a set of taxes for Social Security— named for Social Security, but it doesn’t matter, they’re payroll taxes, terrible taxes, regressive taxes. Nobody… you could not get a legislature to vote such a tax on its own. Can you imagine proposing a tax that would impose — let’s say sixteen percent tax— on all wages from the first dollar up to the maximum and nothing beyond that. Can you imagine voting that? Similarly, the other side of the picture is that we have made a series of commitments to people like me— I receive Social Security payments…
ROBINSON Oh so, it’s my payroll tax that goes to…
FRIEDMAN Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s not only your payroll tax, it’s your income tax, it’s whatever taxes you pay. I get them. And if you think you’re going to get ’em, you’re kidding yourself.
ROBINSON It is a fundamental deceit hoisted upon the American people and sustained for lo these six decades.
FRIEDMAN Absolutely. If you read the Social Security brochures, they say this is a system under which you are putting aside money now for your retirement.
ROBINSON And that’s nonsense.
FRIEDMAN That is utterly fake. But let’s suppose it were true…
ROBINSON All-right.
FRIEDMAN …for a moment. Why is it that it’s appropriate for government to come and tell me what fraction of my income I should save for my old age? If that’s okay, why can’t it come in and tell me exactly what fraction of my income I have to spend for food, what fraction for housing, what fraction for clothing. Let me show you the absurdity of this.
ROBINSON All-right.
FRIEDMAN Consider a young man of thirty-five who has AIDS for whom the expected length of life is ten years at the most maybe. Maybe there’ll be a cure. But his expected length of life is not very long. Is it really intelligent for him to put aside fifteen percent of his income for retirement at age sixty-five?
ROBINSON It’s outrageous.
FRIEDMAN It’s outrageous.
ROBINSON Outrageous.
FRIEDMAN Exactly. The only word you can give to it. And in my opinion, the whole Social Security system is an outrage.
ROBINSON If Social Security is ‘an outrage,’ what would Milton Friedman do about it? A Bonding Experience
ROBINSON How would you get rid of it?
FRIEDMAN Very simply. Here I am, I’m entire to a certain number of payments in the future. Have the government give me a bond equal to the current present value of— expected value of what I’m entitled to. You have already accumulated some rights. And so have the government give you a bond which will be due when you’re sixty-five which will be the present value of what you’ve already accumulated under the law. And then close the whole thing up.
ROBINSON And just close the books.
FRIEDMAN Everybody gets what he’s entitled to— what he’s been promised. The unfunded debt under Social Security is funded, it’s made open and above-board. There’s not a penny of transition cost, and everybody is… In my world, the payroll tax would be abolished, would be eliminated. It’s the worst tax we have on the books. And everybody would be free to do what he wanted about his own retirement.
ROBINSON Okay.
FRIEDMAN And on the whole he would do very well. Now undoubtedly, people who argue against that say, well what are you going to do about these people who are so careless and so unprudent that they don’t accumulate anything for retirement. That’s a general problem. What do you do about people who are poor, whether for their own fault or not for their own fault? You and I and society in general is not willing to see ’em starve to death.
ROBINSON Correct.
FRIEDMAN Well, I have always been in favor of having a program under which (a negative income tax) under which you will have some income minimum you will provide for people whether they are indigent because they’re wastrels or whether they’re indigent because they’re in bad health…
ROBINSON Even if it’s their own fault, they don’t starve.
FRIEDMAN The problem is, it’s always seemed to me absurd that you make a hundred percent of the people do something in order to make sure that one or two percent of the people don’t behave badly.
ROBINSON Milton, that negative income tax proposal actually started to go someplace, if I remember my history correctly, that actually started to go someplace during the Nixon years, didn’t it? Didn’t Cap Weinberger…
FRIEDMAN Yes, it did… No, Moynihan, Pat Moynihan…
ROBINSON Moynihan. And what happened to it? Why did it die?
FRIEDMAN Because the public pressure was converted into a program that I testified against. It’s what happens in Washington all the time.
ROBINSON Right, right, okay.
ROBINSON Next question. What would Milton Friedman do with the mounting budget surplus?
SAVING PRIVATE EARNING
ROBINSON We’ve got seventy-nine, eighty billion dollars more coming in this year than the government…
FRIEDMAN I am in favor of reducing taxes under any circumstances, for any excuse, with any reason whatsoever because that’s the only way you’re ever going to get effective control over government spending. Sooner or later [
ROBINSON Choke off the supply.] if you don’t reduce taxes to get rid of that surplus, it’s going to be spent. The rule from not only the last few years, hundreds of years, is that governments will spend whatever the tax system will raise plus as much more as they can get away with.
ROBINSON The Republicans are calling for a ten percent…
FRIEDMAN It’s not enough.
ROBINSON …cut. Not enough. What is… Now Dan Quayle, who’s running for President— this is the most extreme- extreme may be the wrong word but this is the most dramatic proposal I’m aware of that’s on the table anywhere at the moment— he’s called for a thirty percent cut. Is that enough?
FRIEDMAN I don’t know. I would cut it as much as you can get away with.
ROBINSON So you’d run the numbers and give back virtually all the surplus.
FRIEDMAN What do you mean give back? Not take.
ROBINSON Excuse me. It’s not take. You’d lower taxes…
FRIEDMAN You know, this idea of giving back, which is a word you use, assumes…
ROBINSON I take back my words, but go ahead and ram them down my throat.
FRIEDMAN …it assumes that every individual is a property of the government and that all of the income that you earn is really the government’s, and it decides how much you can keep and how much it gets. I’ve always said, it treats people as if they were running around with an IBM card on their back which says ‘do not mutilate, punch, or disturb.’
ROBINSON Right. You’ve got more money coming in at the moment than is going out.
FRIEDMAN You ought to reduce taxes by enough to generate…
ROBINSON You don’t want to pay down the debt.
FRIEDMAN Oh no. No, I want to generate a deficit because I want pressure on to get the government to spend less.
ROBINSON You like a federal deficit.
FRIEDMAN No, I don’t like a federal deficit, but I like lower government spending.
ROBINSON All-right. President Clinton has another proposal for using that surplus, and he calls them USA accounts. He’s proposing to use about eleven percent of the surplus over the next fifteen years or so to establish, I quote now from his speech, “universal savings accounts, USA accounts, to give all Americans the means to save,” again quotation here, “with extra help for the least able to save.” Details to follow. You like that idea?
FRIEDMAN No, I think it’s a terrible idea. You know, the idea is saying, I’m going to take your money, but then I’ll give it back to you if you do with it what I tell you to do. Is that a way you have a free society of free, self-reliant individuals who are responsible for themselves? It’s a terrible…
ROBINSON Do you even agree with the premise that the savings rate is too low in this country?
FRIEDMAN I don’t agree with that premise. What is the right savings rate?
ROBINSON Well, gee, you’re the Nobel Prize winner, I thought you’d be able to clue me in.
FRIEDMAN The right savings rate… In a world in which you did not have distortions, in which you did not have government stepping in and distorting the rate at which people save or not, the right saving rate is whatever all the people of the community simply want to save. How much you want to save, how much I want to save. Why shouldn’t people be free to save what they want?
ROBINSON Let’s move to a more theoretical question. Why do we end up with so many stupid government programs when we’re supposed to be so smart in our own private affairs?
THINK LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY
ROBINSON How is it, you credit great intelligence, shrewdness, on the part of individuals when they’re spending their own money and managing their own property in the marketplace, how can we all be so dumb when we give up being players in the marketplace and become citizens participating in the political process? We get hoodwinked by Clinton, we go for this crazy sham of Social Security, how can we be so dumb?
FRIEDMAN Because it’s always so attractive to be able to do good at somebody else’s expense. That the real problem of our government. Government is a way by which every individual believes he can live at the expense of everybody else. That’s— I’m just repeating what Bastiat said two centuries ago, more than two centuries ago. You know, the thing that people don’t really understand is that free societies of the kind we’ve been lucky enough to experience for the last hundred-hundred and fifty years are a very rare exception in human history. Most people, most of history, and at any one time, most people at any one time, have lived in tyranny and misery. And it’s only for a brief period, and why? It is precisely because once you get some government program in— may have been a very good idea, it’s always proposed for good reasons— once it gets in, it becomes a special privilege of a small group which has an enormously strong interest to maintain it, and you do not have any comparable group that has the interest to get rid of it. And therefore, the hardest thing in the world is to get rid of any government program, however badly it works. In fact, try to name any government programs that have been eliminated.
ROBINSON The draft. Well, that’s not a…
FRIEDMAN Yes, the draft is an example, it’s one of the rare examples of a program that has been eliminated. One of the others was Postal Savings. It used to be that the postal system had a savings system which became very popular as a result of the Great Depression. But it disappeared. Why? Because by accident when they set it up, they limited the interest they could pay on postal savings to two percent, and when the market rate got higher than that, all the money was taken out of postal savings and postal savings came to an end. But aside from that, can you name programs that have been eliminated because they failed? And so how will we set a limit on government, and keep it coming back, and the only thing I can see on the horizon that offers a real chance are term-limits.
ROBINSON Term limits?
FRIEDMAN Right now, being a politician is a lifetime career. Being a Congressman is a lifetime career.
ROBINSON Do we have any evidence in the states where term-limits apply that it has worked as you would like to see it work? Term-limits have been in effect here in California for about a decade now… They may have been enacted a decade ago, so they’ve been in effect for perhaps six years…
FRIEDMAN It’s a little early. We don’t really have any very good… However, it so happened, I had occasion to have a conversation the other day with a former Governor of Virginia: Allen, George Allen.
ROBINSON Who, everybody says he’s going to be running for the Senate. Against Chuck Robb.
FRIEDMAN Yes, that’s what he intends to do.
ROBINSON He intends to do. All-right.
FRIEDMAN However, he had, Virginia has a one-term four-year term for the Governor. And he said, you know, he said, if we had had a two-year term, if we had had the situation in most states, that you can run for a second term, I would have spent the third and fourth year of my term working for re-election. I would never have been able to get done what I got done. It was the first real hands-on testimonial I’ve seen to a term-limit. It’s not a good idea for being a legislator to be a lifetime profession. The founders of our country had the idea of legislation as a part-time activity. It is in many states today. But at the federal government level, it’s a full-time profession. And that is very unhealthy because the legislature— it’s not a criticism of the individual— but any human being in that position, he’s going to sit in committee meetings, and day after day he’s going to hear arguments, good arguments, worthy arguments for new programs. He’s going to get very few arguments for getting rid of programs. And the evidence is clear: the longer people are in Congress, the more willing they are to vote government spending.
ROBINSON The polls all show the American people are very concerned about our public schools. What does Milton Friedman think of President Clinton’s proposals to improve those public schools? Hire Learning
ROBINSON President Clinton on public schools. According to the White House fact sheet, he wants to, I quote, “raise standards and increase accountability in public schools (I’ve got to take a deep breath to get through this) through proposals to end social promotion, bring high-quality teachers into the classroom, intervene in failing schools, provide school report cards to parents, strengthen our commitment to smaller class-sizes, and boost our efforts for school modernization.” What grade do you give that proposal?
FRIEDMAN F.
ROBINSON F.
FRIEDMAN What does it mean? It means more government control of schools. What do we really need in schools? We need competition. What we have is a monopoly, and like every monopoly, it’s producing a low-quality product at a very high cost. The way to improve that is to have competition, to make it possible for parents to have a choice of the schools their children attend. All high-income people have that choice now. They can choose their residence for a place with good schools, or they can send their children to private schools, pay twice for schooling: once in taxes and once in tuition. But the lower income classes can’t.
ROBINSON They’re stuck. Milton, didn’t public schools used to work?
FRIEDMAN Yes. When I graduated from high-school in 1928, there were 150,000 school districts in this country. Today, there are 15,000 and the population is twice as great. In the early day, you had local control of schools, and there was effective competition between a large number of local areas. But school districts got consolidated. They got run not by local people but by the professional educators. And most important of all, in the 1960s you began to have the emergence of teachers’ unions taking control of the schools. And since 1960, since the teachers’ unions started emerging, you have had on the whole a rather steady decline in the quality of schooling. If you want to improve automobiles, do you have government step in and tell people what brakes to put on, and so on, or do you rely on the fact that General Motors is going to try to beat Ford, is going to try to beat Toyota? Competition is the most effective way to improve quality, whether in computers, in automobiles, in suits, or in schooling.
ROBINSON Let me ask you to close, if I may, with a prediction. It’s 2009, ten years from today. Is the government of the United States bigger, or smaller?
FRIEDMAN Smaller.
ROBINSON Your ideas are winning?
FRIEDMAN No. The Internet is going to make it harder and harder to collect taxes.
ROBINSON How come?
FRIEDMAN Because you’ll be able to evade taxes, you’ll be able to do your deals in the Cayman Islands.
ROBINSON So the Internet…
FRIEDMAN At the moment I see the Internet as the most likely source of the smaller government.
ROBINSON But in your mind it really will have an effect. That’s not speculative…
FRIEDMAN No, no, no. I believe it will and I believe it’s having it now.
ROBINSON I see. Okay. Milton Friedman— Bill Clinton I hope you’re taking notes, we’ll send a tape of this to the White House— Milton Friedman, thank you very much.
FRIEDMAN That’s all-right. I assure you they won’t look at it. Thank you.
ROBINSON Doctor Friedman believes the government should be smaller and that it will become so. Maybe some future President will preside over such a small government that he can shrink up the State of the Union Address enough to get rid of the Teleprompter and deliver the speech from memory. I’m Peter Robinson. Thanks for joining us.
Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences grades the achievements of the Clinton administration and evaluates the programs the President proposed in his 1999 State of the Union address.
ROBINSON Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I’m Peter Robinson. Our show today: The State of the Union, or more precisely, The State of the Union According to the Nobel Prize Winning Economist, Milton Friedman. Every year the President of the United States travels from the White House to the House of Representatives to deliver a major televised address, the State of the Union Address. The President outlines for the American people the accomplishments of his administration to date, the challenges the nation still faces, and his programs for meeting those challenges. Now, by the time the President delivers his address, it will have been worked on for many days by the President himself and by a large team of speech-writers. There will have been draft after draft after draft, mark-ups, cross-outs, corrections of all kinds. Yet, when we finally see the address, when we watch the President seem to speak all but flawlessly for thirty, forty minutes or more, delivering a speech that must be many pages in length, we never see him refer to a single sheet of paper. The trick: a machine called a Teleprompter that projects the text of the speech onto a plate of glass in such a way that the President, and he alone, can see it. A trick with mirrors. An illusion. Milton Friedman, perhaps the most influential economist of the last half century, believes that when Bill Clinton gave his own most recent State of the Union Address, the Teleprompter wasn’t the only illusion the speech involved.
ROBINSON Milton Friedman, we are in the sixth year of the Clinton Administration, the nation is at peace, the economy is booming, the federal government has gone from a budget deficit of 290 billion dollars in 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected, to a surplus of at least 76 billion dollars for this year. Don’t you want to give Bill Clinton an A?
FRIEDMAN (laughs) No, I want to give the economy an A.
ROBINSON Give the economy an A. How much credit does he deserve?
FRIEDMAN Well, there’s only one way in which I believe he deserves some credit. Because you have a Democrat in the White House and Republicans control the Congress, it’s hard to get any laws passed, and that’s been a great advantage. The source of our prosperity in my opinion dates back to Mr. Reagan’s reductions in tax rates…
ROBINSON 1982.
FRIEDMAN …1982, and deregulation during the Reagan Administration, also go down to the 1986 Tax Act which eliminated a lot of interventions, unfortunately which have been creeping back in. And that unleashed a private enterprise boom which we’re still benefitting from.
ROBINSON We’re not in the sixth year of the Clinton expansion, we’re in the seventeenth year of the Reagan boom.
FRIEDMAN Exactly. The Reagan— I won’t call it a boom, because it really hasn’t been a boom, it’s been a very good, healthy expansion.
ROBINSON Steady, sustainable…
FRIEDMAN It’s a boom in the stock market, but so far as the economy is concerned the average rate of growth is not out of line with what it’s been in the past many times.
ROBINSON It’s in line with historical standards.
FRIEDMAN The long-term rate of growth since the Civil War, for example, is in the order of about three to four percent a year, of which one percent is population growth, one-and-a-half to two percent per capita growth, and we’re in about that same range. But it’s been a notable period for other things. It’s been a notable period because we’ve had this expansion at the same time that inflation has been brought down and relatively stable, and for that the credit belongs to the Federal Reserve under the leadership of Alan Greenspan. I think Alan Greenspan deserves more credit for that than anything else.
ROBINSON More credit than he’s being given, or more credit than Bill Clinton’s being given.
FRIEDMAN No, no— oh, Bill Clinton deserves no credit for that. That’s entirely a result of the Fed and its behavior. The Fed has done a lot of bad things in the past, so I’m delighted to be able to give it credit for one good thing, and it’s done very well under Alan Greenspan.
ROBINSON Does the so-to-speak extra-constitutionality of the Fed disturb you?
FRIEDMAN Yes. I have always been in favor of abolishing the Fed, primarily from a political point of view.
ROBINSON And how would you handle the currency, how would you then manage the currency without the Fed?
FRIEDMAN My favorite proposal is to have a fixed amount of what’s called high-powered money and just keep it there.
ROBINSON Just keep the money supply static?
FRIEDMAN Not the money supply. High-powered money…
ROBINSON Which is…
FRIEDMAN …the currency plus the reserves in the banking system that are now deposits in the Fed, under my system you would convert to currency.
ROBINSON So you would eliminate the policy functions of the Fed, but you might keep a few of their statisticians around to keep tabs on the money supply… but that’s a relatively technical and modest…
FRIEDMAN Well, no, you don’t even have to do that. You just have to keep somebody around to make sure that you replace the worn-out notes and keep the stock quantity of money, in the narrow sense of currency, essentially unchanged, or if you want, growing at three percent a year. But some purely mechanical regime. Given that you do have a Fed, it makes a great deal of difference how it performs. I believe that the inflation that we had in the ’70s was primarily the responsibility of the Fed. I believe that the Great Depression of the ’30s was primarily the responsibility of the Fed. So I’m not… it has in the past done a great deal of harm, but as it happens in this last eight years or so it’s been very good and has brought about…
Milton Friedman and Chile – The Power of Choice Uploaded by FreeToChooseNetwork on May 13, 2011 In this excerpt from Free To Choose Network’s “The Power of Choice (2006)”, we set the record straight on Milton Friedman’s dealings with Chile — including training the Chicago Boys and his meeting with Augusto Pinochet. Was the tremendous […]
Milton Friedman’s negative income tax explained by Friedman in 1968: President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a […]
Milton Friedman on the American Economy (5 of 6) Uploaded by donotswallow on Aug 9, 2009 THE OPEN MIND Host: Richard D. Heffner Guest: Milton Friedman Title: A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy VTR: 5/31/77 _____________________________________ Below is a transcipt from a portion of an interview that Milton Friedman gave on 5-31-77: Friedman: […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 6 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 5 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 4 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 3 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 2 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
Milton Friedman videos and transcripts Part 1 On my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have an extensive list of posts that have both videos and transcripts of MiltonFriedman’s interviews and speeches. Here below is just small list of those and more can be accessed by clicking on “Milton Friedman” on the side of this page or searching […]
The True Cost of Public Education Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo on Mar 5, 2010 What is the true cost of public education? According to a new study by the Cato Institute, some of the nation’s largest public school districts are underreporting the true cost of government-run education programs. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11432 Cato Education Analyst Adam B. Schaeffer explains […]
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