Politicians and Spending Caps

Budget experts worried about the growth of federal spending and deficits have proposed various statutory and constitutional restraints to get the budget under control. I favor a simple cap on the percentage growth in annual total outlays.


Many state governments have spending, deficit, and debt restraints on the books, both statutory and constitutional. The restraints do help to tame state fiscal policy, but there is lots of cheating by the politicians.


Researching Cato’s new Governors Report Card, I came across an illuminating story about Connecticut’s spending restraint mechanism. I quote here at length:

The 1991 General Assembly tried to temper outrage over enactment of the state income tax by drafting a statutory spending cap. Voters would add the cap requirement to the state Constitution one year later by adopting the 28th Amendment.


The cap is supposed to keep spending increases in line with the annual growth in personal income or inflation, whichever is larger. For most of the cap’s history, the legislature has relied on personal income.


The cap system uses an average of personal income growth over the previous five years. That means that the sluggish growth years immediately following the last recession — which ended in 2010 — will continue to limit spending growth under the current cap system.

That makes sense to me—citizen income is stagnant in slow‐​growth Connecticut, so government growth should be limited so that it doesn’t squeeze people more when they can least afford it.


But that’s not how Connecticut politicians see it:

Both political parties have looked for ways around the cap over the past decade. The governor and legislature can exceed the cap legally if they agree and take special steps.


That happened in 2005 when Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, signed a declaration of fiscal exigency — declaring a budget emergency. More than 60 percent of the Democrat‐​controlled House and Senate voted to approve the plan.


Two years later, Rell and lawmakers used the same approach, this time approving a biennial budget that shattered the cap by a record‐​setting $690 million in the first year.


Since in 2011, Malloy has refused to declare a budget emergency. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t bent to the cap’s weight.


The governor has proposed or approved moving spending outside of the cap – in large quantities …


The Democrat‐​controlled Appropriations Committee stunned the Capitol in April 2015 when it proposed a budget that moved billions of dollars in spending for pensions and other retirement benefit costs out from under the cap — for the first time since the spending control was established in 1991.

Both Rell and Malloy have been awarded “F” grades from Cato for their fiscal irresponsibility. It’s a shame that politicians of both parties in Connecticut aren’t abiding by a sensible constitutional restraint passed with the support of 80 percent of voters.