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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (41901)	3/9/2010 7:46:49 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Yeah... GOOD LUCK with finding long-lasting and effective action that way! Its not that its the easy way, or that its necessarily a likely way, its that its the only way. Without it you won't get the structural changes, and without it after the structural changes, they will not be durable and effective. Structural changes will at the margin help, sometimes to a noticeable degree (esp. in terms of delaying rather than eliminating extra spending and deficits). They can reduce the strength of support for limited government that you need. But in the end without such support all the structural legal changes will not be very valuable. The main benefit of the right type of structural change (and of some of the existing structures we already have) is to reduce the tendency that the passion of the moment for some big expansion of government gets locked in nearly permanently. It took a century and a half (and a the great depression) to get the first major entitlements and the other big government policies of the New Deal. That's partially because of existing structural limits, but largely because of the idea that government should be limited. Americans used to support that idea. Some of them do, majorities even durable majorities could again. But such changes (at least the durable ones) usually don't happen quickly. We might not live to see the ideas of limited government gain as much power as they used to have, if they ever gain such power in the US at all. More realistically such ideas might become more powerful and effective without a return to the pre-civil war, or even pre-new deal, level.