TOUGH TO READ THROUGH SPIT (via Kevin Whited::

The Stubborn Welfare State (Robert Samuelson, 2/14/07, Real Clear Politics)

Annual budget debates are sterile -- long on rhetoric, short on action -- because each side blames the other for a situation that neither chooses to change. To cut spending significantly, conservatives would have to go after popular welfare programs, including Social Security and Medicare. To raise taxes significantly, liberals would have to go after the upper-middle class, a constituency they covet (two-thirds of all federal taxes come from the richest fifth). Deficits persist, because neither side risks its popularity, and indeed, both sides pursue popularity with new spending programs and tax breaks.

It might help if Americans called welfare programs -- current benefits for select populations, paid for by current taxes -- by their proper name, rather than by the soothing (and misleading) labels of "entitlements'' and "social insurance.'' That way, we might ask ourselves who deserves welfare and why.

We could consider all of federal spending and not just small bits of it. But most Americans don't want to admit that they are current or prospective welfare recipients. They prefer to think that they automatically deserve whatever they've been promised simply because the promises were made. Americans do not want to pose the basic questions, and their political leaders mirror that reluctance. This makes the welfare state immovable and the budget situation intractable.

It's been sad to watch the normally sensible Mr. Samuelson succumb to BDS over the last couple years but, as Brother Whited points out, if he'd just stop foaming for a second here he'd realize that the means testing the President has proposed in his budget is exactly what he's calling for himself.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2007 8:37 PM