Tuesday, August 29, 2006

A Question for Phil Kerpen   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Reviewing Steven Slivinski's Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government, Kerpen writes: "Slivinski’s data show that the growth of government is far more rapid under periods of united control, with one party running the House, Senate, and White House, than when the House is controlled by the party not in the White House." I wonder how robust this finding is.

Over the last 76 years, there have been 6 1/2 years of unified Republican control and 32 of unified Democratic control. (Right? Feel free to check my math.) Four and a half of them are clustered in this decade. It's possible, then, that the finding that unified control leads to more spending rests on: 1) a plausible theory, 2) the fact that unified Democratic control has generally led to more spending than split governments, and 3) the experience of the last few years, in which high spending may be the result of unified control or of other factors. If either Kerpen or Slivinski has any thoughts on this, I'd be interested in hearing them.

08/29 03:12 PMShare