This Is Why It's So Hard To Cut Public Spending

Odd Lots

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4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Trump administration has come into office with big ambitions to lower the size of the US deficit. So far, a number of small items have been identified as possible waste. But to meaningfully bend the curve on spending, there's widespread agreement that we'd have to look at things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense. This is hard stuff to cut and it's something that governments around the world have long struggled with. How do you pull back on a prior commitment that your constituency has come to expect? In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Firtz Bartel, an assistant professor of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He is also the author of the recent book The Triumph of Broken Promises, which examines the simultaneous economic crisis in the US, UK, and Soviet Union during the 1970s, and how each country was forced economically to essentially "break promises." We talk about what it takes politically to maintain domestic credibility for any government while undergoing such wrenching choices, and why some systems are better suited for it than others.

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1:00.9	Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
1:20.6	I'm Joe Wisenthall.
1:21.9	And I'm Tracy Allaway.
1:23.6	Tracy spending cuts in the air these days.
1:27.9	You could say that. It's a vibe shift.
1:30.6	It's a vibe shift, for sure.
1:31.9	So under the Trump administration, obviously there is a stated ambition to reduce spending and make the government more efficient overall.
	...

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