The lead editorial in the WSJ today is on the explosion in federal spending. Read it here.
As Milton Friedman was fond of pointing out, taxation is a side-show: the real burden of the government is what it spends. The more resources governments gobble up to process through the political sausage grinder, the less is left for the private sector, where good decisions are rewarded and bad ones penalized. The federal budget has been mushrooming for decades, no matter which party has the White House and which controls Congress.
Public choice theory explains that. The constant in Washington (and state capitals) is the presence of well-organized interest groups that demand spending by politicians on things they want and reward those who go along. Compared to the spending constituencies, taxpayers are 97-pound weaklings who usually get sand kicked in their faces.
