Halfback wrote:I offer this as food for thought. My personal belief is that getting any control on Government Spending is damn near impossible. We are two generations into doing it the way we are.
I dont get this alarmism. How quickly people forget? Forget two generations - it was just eight years ago that Bill Clinton was running balanced budgets. He'd done so by modestly raising taxes and modestly cutting spending - thats all really.
Now we are eight years of supply side madness on, and you are deep into debt for simple enough reasons. There is no "pox on both their houses" to this. There used to be balanced budgets. Then Bush came and insisted on simultaneously:
1) Starting a horrendously expensive and unnecessary war
2) Slashing taxes, especially for the richest in the country
3) Escalating spending, not just on military matters but on simple pork.
You cant do all those three things at once. You can not do all those three things at once, without suddenly exploding deficits. Its plain, simple logic.
Wars traditionally are funded by taxes. During WW2, top tax rates were in the ninety-something percent brackets. If you DO think a specific war is a life-or-death necessity, then you have to ask all your countrymen to shoulder the burden and tighten their belts and
pay for it, instead of borrowing the money and saddling future generations up with the debt.
Instead, you have these doctrinarian supply-side conservatives proclaiming that slashing taxes will lead to increased revenues - to revenues even higher than you would otherwise have had, a foolish notion swatted down even by such conservative pundits like Ramesh Ponnuru on
the National Review. And those can then nicely cover the costs of war. Yes, in fairytale land maybe.
Down here in the reality-based community, money doesnt just come falling down from the sky. Waging war, slashing taxes AND increasing domestic spending will get you into big trouble, and has gotten you into big trouble over there. There is no bigger, bipartisan, two-generation problem here. You didnt have this under Clinton.
The only bipartisan element to this problem now is the example Bush has set - the lesson his excess poses to the Democrats. In the nineties, when Bill became President, they faced a choice: increasing spending to implement some of those Democratic ideas that had been on hold for a decade and a half? Or balancing the budget first? The Dems chose the latter - put their dreams on hold and decided to first get the finances in order, so the extra expenses could be
afforded.
But then, just when Clinton had turned a major budget deficit into a surplus, the Republicans took over - and in no time whatsoever wasted all the financial space the Democratic admin had created - on tax cuts disproportionally favouring the richest, even before any war came round.
So if the Dems win again this time, they'll be asking themselves, whats the point? We save the money and the Republicans spend it on their ideological pet moves when their turn in the WH comes around? F*ck that, let's just first get our policies implemented then.
Thats and only thats when this becomes a bipartisan problem after all. But its origin is pretty clear, and pretty recent. You did still have a surplus under Bill.
(Nor did he use that surplus to "pay down" the National Debt.) 
