Reason Magazine: '5 Facts About Govt Spending: Nick Gillespie at Reason Weekend 2012'

Source:Reason Magazine- editor Nick Gillespie at Reason Weekend, in 2012.

"Politicians are like criminals in Batman comics. They're a superstitious, cowardly lot. And the minute that they know they're going to lose elections because they're spending too much money, they will find their inner cheapskate and start [spending less]," said Reason's Nick Gillespie during his speech at the Reason Weekend event in Las Vegas.

In "5 Unacknowledged, Unexpected, and Unavoidable Facts about Government Spending and the Economy," Gillespie says politicians such as President Obama and John Boehner are in denial. Influential economists like Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers correctly diagnose debt as a problem even as they prescribe more debt as the cure." 

From Reason Magazine 

To paraphrase the great Classical Liberal economics Professor Milton Friedman, when he was talking about other people's money: people are always better at spending their own money, then spending other people's money. Professor Friedman was talking about government spending and taxation. 

When you don't have to deal with the consequences of your own spending and don't have to ever pay the bills back and you believe you have unlimited income as a government because you can just tax your people more or borrow money from other countries and argue that our interest rates are so low (thanks to the Federal Reserve and no one or anything else) so deficit spending adding to the national debt won't hurt you because of the interest rates, you're more likely to spend more and waste money, simply because no one is there to hold you accountable and take your hand out of the piggy bank and from borrowing the money from real banks. 

The reason why we have a huge national debt and budget deficit, is because the two major political parties both believe that deficits don't matter (regardless of what the Tea Party says) and we have voters who don't care about deficits and debt, just as long as it doesn't hurt them financially. 

If we ever real interest rates in America, voters will start caring about deficits and debt, because they'll feel the pain from them in high interest rates and inflation and then probably demand that their politicians deal with the debt and deficit, even if that means cutting their favorite programs.