Ruthanasia

Ruth Richardson in New Zealand severely cut government spending in 1991, including spending on welfare.

She called her plan the mother of all budgets, And while it was extremely unpopular with voters at the time, who called it Ruthanasia, twenty years later state spending in New Zealand was still six percentage points lower as a share of GDP than it was when she first took office.

These examples show that serious analysis often done by outside business people can lead to government spending reform that works.

As we saw when going through the budget, America won't be able to fix its finances without tackling the two largest programs, which are Social Security and Medicare, which consume one-third of the US budget.

But I think you'd have to admit that the way in which we've run fiscal policy, it does show that NZ First was never ever keen on sucking enormous amounts of liquidity, as Jordan Williams and others would have us do, out of the fiscal reservoir.

If you don't have the government continually working with the economy, keeping things ticking over, then you have a vo- a, a, a version of Ruthenasia.

We were never, ever gonna agree with that.

Let's talk about policy.