|
|
|
Jewish World Review May 16, 2005 / 7 Iyar, 5765 Government growth and the rest of us By Tucker Carlson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The Senate passed a highway bill this week, overwhelmingly. In a rare display of bipartisanship, 76 out of 100 senators voted themselves a total of 295 billion dollars for transportation projects. Even in Washington, that's a lot of pork.
It is also about 11 billion dollars more than President Bush asked for. In other words, Congress took an already massive budget from a famously free-spending administration and made it vastly bigger. That takes work.
The White House claims to be disturbed by the Senate's compulsive spending. The president is even implying that he may use his veto. But he probably won't. He never has before, not once in his years in office.
Bush won't veto the bill for the same reason members of the Senate voted to approve it. Almost none of them still believes in the principles of limited government. Those principles, you'll remember, swept Republicans into power 11 years ago.
As Andy Ferguson points out in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, voters in 1994 didn't reject Congressional Democrats simply for their liberalism, but for their, quote, "lack of modesty and self-restraint" — for what Ferguson calls their quote "busybody-ism" — the endless, frenetic search by elected officials for ever-new ways to make the country more fabulous.
Republicans have now embraced that frenetic search, as most politicians ultimately do. In the process, they've forgotten what they used to know: fabulousness comes at a high price. When government grows, the rest of us become poorer and less free. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it. But most of the time, it's not.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
© 2005 Tucker Carlson |
Mitch Albom | ||||||||||||
