A new worry occurred to me today. I an confident that a thousand or a million other people have also had it in the last few weeks, but I like this new theory because (ahem! ahem!) it is mine. The totals of b illions saved have been amazing. Thrilling to those supporting them, ghastly to those opposint them, but certainly bigger than anything we have seen.
What if we reach a really big number and pat ourselves on the backs and say job well done and move on to some new focus, but it's still just a drop in the bucket. What if ten years from now, if the Sweet Meteor of Death doesn't take us out in 2032, there are graphs all over the internet showing that there was a slight downturn in growth of government starting in 2025, but the overall trend is not much changed. Barely dented. While we are still toasting each other about how wise we are.
I know we don't really believe in the deficit. We have been told for years that it is going to consume us - any day now, just you wait - but it hasn't. We know from so many other things that things change slowly, slowly, then all at once. You and your girlfriend argue for months and grind your teeth over more and more little things and nothing changes, until one day you have no girlfriend. It is the reasoning that those worrying about climate change or species extinction use. Slowly, slowly, then overnight, and somewhere in that slowly was a point of no return that we missed on the way by.
Yet the numbers really have grown over the last few years. We resist the cuts: the children need shoes, honey! And they do need shoes, but now even shoes are on the table. Er, family budget cut menu. Shoes on the table, shoes on the menu, this metaphor isn't holding up well, but you take my point.
1 comment:
Yes. USAID et al are merely warm-ups for the big problems--and some of those will probably require congressional action. And the Pentagon's job has a built-in degree of inefficiency; parsing out the necessary inefficiency from corruption is a decades' long job.
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