The awful truth is that this country has been grossly mismanaged for decades. The Great Recession has exposed the mismanagement, casting a cruel light upon our impending insolvency.

One might have hoped that in this national emergency, the politicians we elected to serve us would shelve the posturing and insist on doing the right thing instead of the politically palatable thing. If we are to emerge intact from this crisis, we need two things: First, we need to cut spending, drastically, programmatically. I’m not talking about the basket of illusory cuts Congress has so far offered. I mean real cuts. The culture of entitlement must take a long vacation.

Second, we need to stimulate economic growth. We do that not by destroying thousands of cars and bailing out two-thirds of the American auto industry (like many Americans, I have sworn never, ever to buy a car made by Chrysler or Government Motors); you don’t do it with fake stimulus programs in which the government spends money it doesn’t have to reward unions and other special interests which in turn contribute to the politicians who have generously taken money out of other peoples’ pockets and lavished it on them. What you do is cut taxes and make the regulatory environment business-friendly. You don’t penalize success: you reward it, knowing that it builds on itself. You do everything you can to make it easy for business to start and thrive. You recognize that government’s role is to adjudicate disputes, provide a mechanism to assure contracts are honored and honest dealing prevails. Government should not, for example, be in the business of telling you what sort of light bulb to use, who to hire and promote, how much to pay your workers. The market is a genius at sorting out all that.

Phony cuts but real taxes: that is the bad deal our masters in government have given us.

— Roger Kimball, “Phony Cuts/Real Taxes”, Pajamas Media