Tell Me Where All Past Years Are

New at Reason: Matt Welch takes a look back on the last two years, and asks what's really different.

Comments

[Mo]

Brad,

Our current system? FDR was the only president that had a 3rd term. Sure presidents before him had the option to run for a 3rd, but tradition ran counter to that.

[Anonymous]

What country is Welch living in? Yeah, instead of talking about nuking Iraqis, we went and actually fucking bombed a shitload of them. Thank God no one got hysterical.

[Russ D]

I agree with most of what Matt says here, but isn't the Bush administration just offloading the big war bills onto his successors? I'm not trying to Bush-bash here, it just seems to me that this is not the case of the adminstration leaving us alone, it's offloading the problem onto future taxpayers when he's safely out of office, which is another historical US temptation since FDR (and probably earlier than that). At least Nixon had the stones (or stupidity) to screw the people over right then and there.

[Douglas Fletcher]

If you have rats in the backyard you'd best pay the ratman to get rid of them.

[Brad S]

Russ D - the phenomenon you described (off-loading the tax burden to fund current programs onto the shoulders of future taxpayers) is an inevitable conclusion of our system of government, whereby a president can only govern for 8 years. The president will be safely out of office before citizens begin to really feel the tax burden. It's sort of like having a credit card with a very, very high limit and knowing that you are going to die in 8 years. The temptation is to run up as much debt on that credit card as you can in those 8 years.

So, in our current system, it is almost inevitable that the size of government will swell. I don't know what the right answer to this problem is. Perhaps lifting or easing term limits would be a start. Perhaps a cap on how much the federal budget can increase in a given year (maybe set the cap equal to GDP growth, or inflation as measured by the core CPI, or something like that).

[objective dissent]

Spending and budget caps are the practical answers to the containment problem.

As for the "cost" that Bush is putting on us, there are a couple of good editorials in the WSJ today; one on the cost of the overall war and one by Kaplan from The New Republic on the mentality of post 911 America. Good reads both of them.

Defense/war spending is not neccesarily a bad thing in context to what we get for our money, safety. No more terror attacks on our soil is definitely worth a lot to me.

[objective dissent]

An additional thought, indexing any kind of caps to the CPI, core or otherwise, would cause endless and heretofore never imagined tinkering from the Fed. Whatever we indexed the budgetary caps to, it would have to be something that the feds couldn't get their hands on, so to speak.

[Anonymous]

The containment problem is best handled by more internal threats to the lives of our politicians. If they felt the odds of getting whacked were greater the more fiscally irresponsible they were, they'd show more restraint.

Isn't the War On Terrorism the same thing as a War On War?

Hey, a Wilco reference!