Starve the beast

"Starving the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending.

The term "the beast", in this context, refers to the United States Federal Government, which funds numerous programs and government agencies using mainly American taxpayer dollars. These programs include: education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defence.

On July 14, 1978, economist Alan Greenspan testified to the U.S. Finance Committee: "Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending."

Before his election as President, then-candidate Ronald Reagan foreshadowed the strategy during the 1980 US Presidential debates, saying "John Anderson tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."

The earliest use of the actual term "starving the beast" to refer to the political-fiscal strategy (as opposed to its conceptual premise) was in a Wall Street Journal article in 1985, wherein the reporter quoted an unnamed Reagan staffer.

The tax cuts and deficit spending of former US President George W. Bush's administration were attempts to "starve the beast." Bush said in 2001: "so we have the tax relief plan [...] that now provides a new kind—a fiscal straightjacket [sic] for Congress. And that's good for the taxpayers, and it's incredibly positive news if you're worried about a federal government that has been growing at a dramatic pace over the past eight years and it has been."

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