Yes, it's progressive to cut wasteful goverment spending

Various libertarians say that a taxpayer receipt would lead taxpayers to want to reduce spending. I think the likely effect on taxpayers is that a receipt will change nothing, but I hope I'm wrong on this, and the libertarians are right. In particular, I hope the sums being spent on Medicaid, Medicare and defense will all raise some eyebrows. Which is rather the point. After all, the idea comes from Third Way's deficit-reduction package.

Libertarians shouldn't act so surprised that a center-left think tank is proposing something that might spur people to cut government spending. Both the Obama and Clinton administrations went to enormous trouble to develop health-care proposals that would pay for themselves and cut both the government's and the system's overall rate of spending. We can argue over whether the proposals will (or, in Clinton's case, would've) worked, but there's no doubt that the Obama administration fought for the excise tax on high-value health-care insurance and the Independent Payment Advisory Board because they think the proposals will work. By contrast, the Bush administration added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and did nothing at all to pay for it.

The reality is that Democrats have spent years trying to cut spending in the health-care sector, and when they think they can get away with it, in the defense sector, too. That's partially because there's an authentic concern about deficits among the sort of center-left economists who staff Democratic presidential administrations, but it's also because people who think the government underinvests in important priorities such as early childhood education realize that's unlikely to change if health-care spending keeps growing as a percentage of the federal budget. I wrote about this back in June 2009: