That’s the name of the website of Jack Dean, who is interviewed in this new Rea​son​.tv video about how excessive pension promises to bureaucrats are creating a fiscal nightmare for state and local governments.

In a recent Wall Street Journal oped, Carnegie-Mellon economist Allan Meltzer explains how ObamaCare is delaying economic recovery:

Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds and words heightened uncertainty about the economic future. High uncertainty is the enemy of investment and growth…

Mr. Obama has denied the cost burden on business from his health-care program, but business is aware that it is likely to be large. How large? That’s part of the uncertainty that employers face if they hire additional labor…

Then there is Medicaid, the medical program for those with lower incomes. In the past, states paid about half of the cost, and they are responsible for 20% of the additional cost imposed by the program’s expansion. But almost all the states must balance their budgets, and the new Medicaid spending mandated by ObamaCare comes at a time when states face large deficits and even larger unfunded liabilities for pensions. All this only adds to uncertainty about taxes and spending.

Meltzer concludes that the Obama administration is making the same mistake as FDR: “President Roosevelt slowed recovery in 1938–40 until the war by creating uncertainty about his objectives. It was harmful then, and it’s harmful now.”

For more on the harm caused by government-created uncertainty, read my colleague Tad DeHaven’s recent posts.

There is considerable academic research on the growth-maximizing level of government spending. Based on a good bit of research, I’m fairly confident that Cato’s Richard Rahn was the first to popularize this concept, so we are going to make him famous (sort of like Art Laffer) in this new video explaining that there is a spending version of the Laffer Curve and that it shows how government is far too large and that this means less prosperity.

The 1990s were a decade of rapid private sector expansion and federal government restraint. The 2000s are a decade of government expansion at all levels and private sector retrenchment.

From 1990 to 2000, private sector employment soared 21 percent. Then, remarkably, private sector employment actually fell during the 2000s and was 3 percent lower in 2010 than it was in 2000.

The chart shows the changes in government employment in these time periods.

(Note: Numbers are for January of each year for consistency and to avoid the inclusion of temporary federal decennial census workers that show up in later months.)

Federal employment declined during the 1990s, when we mainly had Clinton in the White House and Republican control of Congress. However, federal employment increased under the Bush administration and the Obama administration is pursuing further growth. As a Cato essay on overpaid federal employees shows, growth in federal employment will cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

The Obama administration is concerned that the economic recovery will be jeopardized by revenue-strapped state and local governments cutting employees. Therefore, it’s advocating another federal bailout for the states to head off government job cuts. However, government jobs are supported with money taxed or borrowed out of the economy. Diverting more resources away from the private sector in order to sustain the public sector is a recipe for economic stagnation – not growth.

Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Why a taxpayer gift to a wealthy Indian tribe in Connecticut isn’t any more egregious than the billions of dollars of other subsidies handed out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• Protectionism at the Department of Commerce is helping 200 workers at an ironing board manufacturing plant in Indiana. However, it’s hurting millions of U.S. consumers by forcing them to pay higher prices for ironing boards.
• Pigs still can’t fly: More concerns for the Federal Aviation Administration’s next-generation air traffic control system.
• The evidence is more than anecdotal: Businesses are reluctant to invest or hire because they’re concerned that the president’s big government agenda will mean higher taxes and more onerous regulations.

Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are the two main characters in what is being portrayed as a fight between American “stimulus” and European “austerity” at the G‑20 summit meeting in Canada. My immediate instinct is to cheer for the Europeans. After all, “austerity” presumably means cutting back on wasteful government spending. Obama’s definition of “stimulus,” by contrast, is borrowing money from China and distributing it to various Democratic-leaning special-interest groups.
 
But appearances can be deceiving. Austerity, in the European context, means budget balance rather than spending reduction. As such, David Cameron’s proposal to boost the U.K.‘s value-added tax from 17.5 percent to 20 percent is supposedly a sign of austerity even though his Chancellor of the Exchequer said a higher tax burden would generate “13 billion pounds we don’t have to find from extra spending cuts.”
 
Raising taxes to finance a bloated government, to be sure, is not the same as Obama’s strategy of borrowing money to finance a bloated government. But proponents of limited government and economic freedom understandably are underwhelmed by the choice of two big-government approaches.
 
What matters most, from a fiscal policy perspective, is shrinking the burden of government spending relative to economic output. Europe needs smaller government, not budget balance. According to OECD data, government spending in eurozone nations consumes nearly 51 percent of gross domestic product, almost 10 percentage points higher than the burden of government spending in the United States.
 
Unfortunately, I suspect that the “austerity” plans of Merkel, Cameron, Sarkozy, et al, will leave the overall burden of government relatively unchanged. That may be good news if the alternative is for government budgets to consume even-larger shares of economic output, but it is far from what is needed.
 
Unfortunately, the United States no longer offers a competing vision to the European welfare state. Under the big-government policies of Bush and Obama, the share of GDP consumed by government spending has jumped by nearly 8‑percentage points in the past 10 years. And with Obama proposing and/​or implementing higher income taxes, higher death taxes, higher capital gains taxes, higher payroll taxes, higher dividend taxes, and higher business taxes, it appears that American-style big-government “stimulus” will soon be matched by European-style big-government “austerity.”
 
Here’s a blurb from the Christian Science Monitor about the Potemkin Village fiscal fight in Canada:

This weekend’s G‑20 summit is shaping up as an economic clash of civilizations – or at least a clash of EU and US economic views. EU officials led by German chancellor Angela Merkel are on a national “austerity” budget cutting offensive as the wisest policy for economic health, ahead of the Toronto summit of 20 large-economy nations. Ms. Merkel Thursday said Germany will continue with $100 billion in cuts that will join similar giant ax strokes in the UK, Italy, France, Spain, and Greece. EU officials say budget austerity promotes the stability and market confidence that are prerequisites for their role in overall recovery. Yet EU pro-austerity statements in the past 48 hours are also defensive – a reaction to public statements from US President Barack Obama and G‑20 chairman Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, that the overall effect of national austerity in the EU will harm recovery. They are joined by US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, investor George Soros, and Nobel laureate and columnist Paul Krugman, among others, arguing that austerity works against growth, and may lead to a recessionary spiral.

From ArtsAndScience, the magazine of Vanderbilt University’s College of Arts and Science:

Assistant Professor of Chemistry John McLean has been awarded a $2.7 million Grant Opportunity grant from the National Institutes of Health as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.