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It's become a familiar story for liberals. Conservatives took power, cut taxes, but didn't really ever get around to cutting spending. We take it, rightly, as a sign of intellectual bankruptcy and the fundamental impracticality of the conservative project. But rarely do conservatives even acknowledge the problem. That's what makes this long essay by William Voegeli in the Opinion Journal interesting:
The experience of a quarter century shows that tax cuts have served important purposes, but the cause of scaling back Big Government is not one of them. Fiscal policy-making is an ongoing political science experiment, testing the relative strength of the aversion to taxes, the appetite for government programs, and the feasibility of large-scale borrowing. The results are in, and they're not ambiguous: Under every set of circumstances, the levels of taxing and borrowing increase to accommodate government spending, to a far greater extent than government spending decreases in order to avoid excessive taxation or deficits.That's refreshingly... honest. Essentially, the piece argues, sensibly, that conservatives, instead of trying to end things like Social Security, should instead focus on limiting the size of the welfare state to assistance for the poorest people:
