The NYT Wants the U.S. to Have Slower Growth

That would seem to be the implication of the advice in an article that we should follow Canada's model for dealing with our deficit. According to the NYT, Canada did things right when it decided to get its deficit down in 1994, doing a comprehensive review of its spending.

Since that was almost 20 years ago, we have some basis for assessing how things turned out. According to the OECD's data on productivity growth (the main determinant of living standards), it doesn't seem that Canada has...