AIER's Bastiat Society of Nashville guest speaker Grant Starrett, on "How the dollar once limited government," July 13th.

 

AIER's Bastiat Society of Nashville invites you to join us on Tuesday, July 13th for an event with Grant Starrett, Vice President of Acquisitions at Lion Real Estate Group, and on Tuesday, August 15th for an event with Peter T. Calcagno, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Public Choice & Market Process at the College of Charleston.

Registration for these events is required on the Nashville Chapter website. To register, click here.

July 13th discussion with Grant Starrett:

Amidst the highest inflation in decades, Grant Starrett revisits the Founders' views on sound money, how they gave those views power in the Constitution with the explicit intent to limit the size of government and how we abandoned the original meaning (as we have with so many other clauses). If you're wondering how the federal government got so big, there really are two answers: that we abandoned the original meaning of the Constitution and the federal government rearranged its own financing. As Grant reveals, the two are intricately related.

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August 15th discussion with Peter T. Calcagno:

Why has the United States experienced steadily rising deficits in the modern budget era, despite nearly five decades of legislative attempts to achieve fiscal discipline? Much of what the economics profession has written about U.S. public debt misses the central problem. Traditional approaches argue that rising deficits and accumulating debt pose risks of financial, fiscal, and economic crises or that rising deficits and the accumulated debt are not major problems but are instead the preferred solution to economic instability and slow growth.

None of these approaches can explain the Modern Budget Era Problem, which consists of two contrasting facts. On the one hand, U.S. fiscal policy has experienced a half century of business-as-usual deficits and mounting debt, even during non-emergency periods. On the other hand, business-as-usual deficits have unfolded despite 50 years of Congressional attempts to legislate fiscal discipline.

We trace the roots of today's fiscal policy problems to changes in informal institutions, or fiscal norms, during the 1880-1930 period. During this period, the prevailing informal institution changed from what has been called the Balanced Budget Norm (BBN) to what we call the Deficit-as-Policy Norm (DAP). In short, "informal norms trump formal constraints".

Eventbrite Ticket Required. Registration link coming soon.

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