That's the theme song of the Anti-Tax Movement. It will remain top of the charts as long as the mania for ever smaller government and ever lower taxes continues at its current pace in much of the Western World.At their annual convention last October, Stephen Harper's Conservatives passed a motion to introduce balanced budget legislation freezing federal government spending at $300 billion for four years beginning in 2016-17. The idea has been a longstanding goal for Maxime Bernier, the playboy libertarian who took a former biker gang girlfriend to a cabinet swearing-in ceremony.Two former senior economists – Scott Clark, former deputy minister of finance and senior advisor to the prime minister, and Peter DeVries, former director of the federal finance department's Fiscal Policy Division with overall responsibility for preparing the federal budget – believe balanced budget laws are a recipe for disaster.In two articles published in the online newspaper, iPolitics, Nov.5, 2013 and Jan. 22, 2014, the economists warn that a balanced budget law would gut the federal government.Clark and DeVries calculate total revenue loss by 2017-18 would be larger than all the one-year cumulative restraint measures introduced since the March 2010 federal budget four years ago.They  tick off the programs that would effectively be gutted or at least shrunk to vestigial proportions:  Old Age Security, Employment Insurance, the Canada Health Transfer (CHT), the Canada Social Transfer, (CST), fiscal arrangements, alternative payments for standing programs, Crown corporations and public debt charges.Already, the government has moved to reduce the annual escalator for Canada's two core – and historic – social programs: the CST and the CHT. The CHT will be reduced from  six per cent annually to a three-year moving average in nominal GDP. The CST is capped at three per cent annually.To date, no major new changes are expected in the historic equalization law that attempts to ensure comparable levels of core government services to Canadians at comparable levels of taxation regardless of the fiscal capacity of their province.But recently, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has been plumping for a federal balanced budget law in spite of the fact, as Clark and DeVries note, that “since 2008, the Harper government has set a number of fiscal targets – only to blow every one of them.”They now warn the government intends to make direct program spending bear the brunt of any future budgetary freeze although it already shoulders most of the restraint measures to date.The two economists predict that if the Conservatives carry through on Bernier's balanced budget resolution, they will have to find program savings reaching $13.9 billion in 2017-18 and rising higher thereafter. Worse, all new spending would have to come from ongoing cuts to existing programs.Their conclusion? The “steady gutting of the federal government.”American anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist summed up the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-equality zietgist sweeping the Western world with this pithy quote: "I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."The same anti-government, anti-tax mania took hold in Canada well before the Harper Conservatives. In July, 1993, Progressive Conservative MLA Brian Pallister, now Manitoba's Official Opposition Leader, wrote to the Fraser Institute to ask if the U.S. had balanced budget provisions and whether they were effective.The reply, from then-Fraser Institute policy analyst John Robson (now a columnist and commentator with Sun Media) was not encouraging. While 48 of the 50 states had constitutionalized balanced-budget laws, they also had an accumulated debt of $860 billion.Nevertheless, the then-government of Progressive Conservative Premier Gary Filmon embraced Pallister's idea and introduced Canada's first balanced budget law in 1995. It carried the impressive title of The Balanced Budget, Debt Repayment and Taxpayer Protection and Consequential Amendments Act.Its novel feature was that no major tax increase could occur unless validated in a province-wide referendum. Any government that raised taxes without a referendum had to subject its ministers to a 20 per cent pay cut in the first year, rising to 40 per cent in the second year.The act remained virtually dormant for nearly two decades. The NDP government of Gary Doer made just one amendment to it, allowing a government to achieve fiscal balance over its four-year mandate instead of having to balance the books annually.But in 2013, facing a budget crunch due to several major floods and other fiscal pressures, Doer's successor, Greg Selinger, raised the provincial sales tax one point to eight per cent without holding the required referendum.Pallister, now the PC Opposition leader, went into overdrive, whipping up public rage over the government's decision not to just ignore the law,  but “gouge” taxpayers without their consent.The NDP saw its comfortable lead in opinion polls evaporate. The latest provincial poll taken in late December pegs its support at just 26 per cent compared to 48 per cent for the Conservatives and 20 per cent for the Liberals.University of Manitoba economist Wayne Simpson and political scientist Jared Wesley published a paper last year on balanced budget legislation for Canadian Public Policy with the title Effective Tool or Effectively Hollow.“Being fiscally prudent doesn't necessarily mean you have to balance the books every year,” Simpson says.  “Sensible legislation for fiscal prudence doesn't have to be left or right. But it is used by some parties to say we want smaller government and every time we have less resources we just do less.”Simpson notes that most of the provinces with balanced budget laws (only New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland don't have them) launched them at the end of the 1990s recession. “Budgets were moving into balance so they could see they could balance their budgets without having to cut spending.”True no more. All governments are struggling.Simpson also notes that the eastern provinces, unlike the western provinces, haven't straitjacketed themselves with American-style populist concepts like referenda, leaving them room to respond to the changing needs and demands of their electorates.Frances Russell was born in Winnipeg and graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science. A journalist since 1962, she has covered and commented on politics in Manitoba, Ontario, B.C. and Ottawa, working for The Winnipeg Tribune, United Press International, The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun and The Winnipeg Free Press as well as freelanced for The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, CBC Radio and TV and Time Magazine.She is the author of two award-winning books on Manitoba history: Mistehay Sakahegan – The Great Lake: The Beauty and the Treachery of Lake Winnipeg and The Canadian Crucible – Manitoba's Role in Canada's Great Divide. Both won the Manitoba Historical Society Award for popular history.She is married with one son and two grandsons and lives in Winnipeg.