Ben Stein Dreemz
A Government Lacking in Discipline
D
iscipline. it’s a word we often see when we’re reading about basketball teams or tennis professionals.
It’s a word we always see when we are reading about
ballet dancers. It is sometimes, not always, a word we see when we are talking about teaching in elementary school. But it comes blasting into my old mind when I read
about the federal government’s taxation and spending. It comes blasting into my mind mostly because it’s missing from modern life. This came into focus when I was up, sleepless as an
owl, late one night. I picked up a slender volume from a stack of important books I had yet to read, Governing the $5 Trillion Economy. The book was published by a super-reputable foundation called the Twentieth Century Fund. It came out in 1989 and was written by my father, the economist, Herbert Stein, whose credits would go on forever. My father was writing, in large part, about the
problems of infl ation in the postwar world. At that time, we were having infl ation of about 2.5% annually. That was considered cause for alarm, and it was. The question the book posed in the main was what government policy should be to address that “crisis,” while also addressing the problems of the day for the government — how much to spend on defense, how much on farming, on welfare, on interest, on the national debt. The big issue was how much of a surplus or a defi cit
the government should run to provide for the vital needs of the nation while still not adding excessively to the national debt.
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defi cit the federal government should run in any one year. There were some who said that “defi cits don’t matter.”
They argued that government defi cits would so stimulate the economy that they would actually add to tax revenues after a short time. They said government should only plan to run
surpluses when we forecast immense infl ation. We would need the surpluses then to restrain the economy and lower demand and lessen infl ation. My father noted the extreme diffi culty that the government would run into if we really thought we were shamans and could predict the future of the economy with any accuracy. That was a fi ne point. But what really shook me was
a view from the recent past that government would have the courage to ever run surpluses. In recent years we have seen that when government comes anywhere near a surplus, government lowers taxes or spends like banshees to curry favor with the voters. Only the tiniest few hardy souls in Congress have the discipline to actually act to restrain spending or raise taxes. That is America as we see it today: Not enough discipline to spend enough on defense. Not enough discipline to raise taxes to get our grandchildren out of the hole. Not enough discipline to run a nation the way a
business must be run. Not enough discipline to put violent criminals in
prison and keep them there. The future is upon us, and I am scared.
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