“When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.”
Edward Gibbon, 1737 – 1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

In my last blog, “The Government We Deserve,” I reported on a new book “Dead Men Ruling” by Eugene Steuerle, which shows how “Dead and retired policymakers have put America on a budget path in which spending will grow faster than any conceivable growth in revenues.”
Our country is clearly in a huge predicament.  We can get out of this jam by:

• Restoring Balance: our legislators should only appropriate spending for one year at a time.
• Investing in our future: i) opportunity is a more optimistic goal than adequacy ii) policies to assure adequacy often reduce opportunity by creating negative incentives    (e.g. food stamps, disability programs, housing vouchers) iii) means-tested programs are often anti-family (i.e. discourage marriage)
• Building a Better Government: our main goal today should be to restore fiscal freedom by allowing future generations to create the government they need and want. i)   constrain the automatic growth in big federal tax subsidy, health and retirement      programs ii) reorient government towards investment, children, opportunity and leanness

“Both parties talk the talk about deficit reduction but fail to see that the deficit is but a symptom of a much broader disease – the extent to which both have tried to legislate far too much of what future government should look like.”
Here are the kinds of fixes which are needed:

• Eschew Constitutional Fixes (i.e. a balanced budget amendment, term limits).
• Require Presidents to propose budgets which balance over a business cycle.
• A True Grand Compromise (end automatic growth of entitlements, generate revenues needed to pay current bills).

As Mr. Steuerle says, “If the obstacles to progress are considerable, the payoffs are enormous.”