In the Washington Examiner, American Enterprise Institute fellow Michael Barone writes about America’s excessively large government, as demonstrated by the Fraser Institute, and how Canada is showing the way on cutting government spending. He cites an AEI/Macdonald-Laurier Institute event that could provide a model for the U.S.
Barone writes: “For more on how Canada did it, I recommend reviewing the video or transcript of a panel event co-sponsored by AEI and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute of Canada back in September 2012. It wasn’t at all a partisan picture. The lead speaker was Paul Martin of the Liberal party, who as finance minister presided over the spending cuts and who later served as prime minister. Also speaking were the Conservative Party’s Stockwell Day and the New Democratic Party’s Janice MacKinnon, who as leaders of the Alberta and Saskatchewan provincial governments in the mid-1990s also managed the cuts. Message: They were painful, some people got hurt; MacKinnon said her province shut down dozens of hospitals in a single day. But they worked. They have been followed by low-inflation economic growth. Canada’s government share of gross domestic product fell downward toward that of the United States. Unhappily, both rose after the 2007-09 recession, but both are falling again. Now if we can just get them converging at a lower number …”
