by Nick Tomboulides
“If you pass term limits, lobbyists and staff will have too much power,” the critics grumbled, before Floridians enacted term limits with 77 percent of the vote in 1992.
According to new research from Prof. Randall Holcombe of Florida State University, these doom and gloom predictions were way off-the-mark. Holcombe took two touchstones for the size of state government — appropriations as a percentage of Gross State Product and the percentage of Florida’s population employed by the state — and compared the numbers before and after term limits took effect.
He found that Florida’s term-limited legislature has coincided with a shrinking of state government, a reversal of national trends. Florida’s state budget as a share of income has fallen by 22 percent in the past two decades. Our government workforce has also dropped over the same period, from a high of 1.25 percent in 1997 to only 0.95 percent in 2012.
As Holcombe points out, legislative staff and lobbyists are more vocal advocates for big government than the legislators with whom they work. Staff build impermeable links with the bureaucracy and lobbyists typically ask for the Reverse JFK; that is, “what can government do for me (or my client)?”
Ultimately, the data shows that term-limited legislators in Florida have done an effective job keeping spending under control. While it cannot be shown that limiting terms caused the turnaround, this is clear evidence that one of critics’ biggest concerns about term limits was without merit.
Nick Tomboulides has been the Executive Director of U.S. Term Limits since 2013. He lives in Florida.
