THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONGRESSIONAL SPENDING AND TENURE WITH AN APPLICATION TO TERM LIMITS

Whether term limits would increase or decrease federal spending depend s on the reason for the causal relationship between tenure and spendin g. We investigate this subject by empirically studying congressional s pending and tenure for all United States House and Senate members who entered Congress between the 94th and 102nd Congresses (1975-1992). As our measure of congressional spending we use the National Taxpayers U nion's Congressional Spending Scores. Our study finds that a statistic ally significant relationship exists between congressional spending an d tenure for some groups of congressmen. We then test three hypotheses relating tenure and spending. No single hypothesis is consistent with all of our empirical results. Nevertheless, the small sizes of the em pirical effects estimated in this study suggest that term limits would have an inconsequential impact on the level of federal spending-at le ast via the ''moral hazard'' mechanisms described in this paper.