{"id":20441,"date":"2013-05-27T00:01:49","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T05:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20441"},"modified":"2013-05-26T11:48:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T16:48:42","slug":"qotd-two-lessons-from-calvin-coolidge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/27\/qotd-two-lessons-from-calvin-coolidge\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Two lessons from Calvin Coolidge"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I managed to talk for more than 15 minutes, but I could have boiled my remarks down to these two points.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Small government is the best way to achieve competent and effective government. Coolidge and his team were able to monitor government and run it efficiently because the federal budget consumed only about 5 percent of GDP. But when the federal budget is 23 percent of GDP, by contrast, it\u2019s much more difficult to keep tabs on what\u2019s happening \u2013 particularly when the federal government operates more than 1,000 programs. Even well-intentioned bureaucrats and politicians are unlikely to do a good job, [&#8230;]<\/li>\n<li>Higher tax rates don\u2019t automatically lead to more tax revenue. Coolidge and his Treasury Secretary practiced something called \u201cscientific taxation,\u201d but it\u2019s easier just to call it common sense. Since Amity\u2019s book covered the data from the 1920s, I shared with the audience some amazing data from the 1980s showing that lower tax rates on the \u201crich\u201d led to big revenue increases.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Dan Mitchell, <a href=\"https:\/\/danieljmitchell.wordpress.com\/2013\/05\/25\/two-lessons-from-calvin-coolidge\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Two Lessons from Calvin Coolidge&#8221;, <em>International Liberty<\/em><\/a>, 2013-05-26<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I managed to talk for more than 15 minutes, but I could have boiled my remarks down to these two points. Small government is the best way to achieve competent and effective government. Coolidge and his team were able to monitor government and run it efficiently because the federal budget consumed only about 5 percent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,41,13],"tags":[883,118],"class_list":["post-20441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-calvincoolidge","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5jH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20442,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20441\/revisions\/20442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}