The old fiscal conservative mantra—that cutting taxes restrains government—has failed the test of time. When spending continues on borrowed funds, it’s not the beast that starves, but future taxpayers.

In her excellent podcast, The Great Antidote, Juliette Sellgren often asks her guests to name one thing that they once believed to be true but no longer do. It’s a good question. Intelligent people are people who learn, and it’s practically impossible to learn without at least occasionally discovering that something that you once were quite confident is true is likely to be false.

Having now reached the age of 67, I would be embarrassed to look back on my career only to discover that I’ve changed my mind about nothing over these many years. Fortunately for me, I have indeed changed my mind about several substantive matters.

For example, I once believed, like Milton Friedman, that among the most effective tools for reining in excessive government growth is to “starve the beast” – that is, to keep tax revenues as low as possible. Starved of tax revenues, big government would have no choice but to shrink into smaller government, one that can survive on appropriately small sums of revenue.

I no longer believe that this theory of “starving the beast” is correct. It’s now obvious to me that as long as the government can finance its current expenditures with borrowed funds, a policy of refusing to allow taxes to be raised in order to meet expenditures doesn’t starve the beast; that policy engorges the beast.

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