A ‘Period Dignity Officer’ Seemed Like a Good Idea. Until a Man Was Named.
This column is part of the American Spectator’s ongoing series on the future of law. See all of our recent contributions to this series here.
Last week, I learned from the Wall Street Journal that the United States needed to borrow more money, that the federal government is broke, and that Congress will have to borrow more and more money if we are to pay our bills.
I had been thinking for decades about whether or not the federal government is “too big and not big enough.” In recent years, I’ve been arguing that perhaps the answer to that question is bigger and not just bigger, but also better.
Over the last four years, I’ve written about the need to reform the way in which the federal government is run. When the United States is threatened with an international crisis, I’ll argue that the best way to protect national security is to shrink the federal government, so that we can protect ourselves from threats in the short term and protect our long-term economic growth.
The problem that led me to write about this and that inspired this column is what I would now call the Obama “government shutdown.”
In the end, I think the government shutdown is a good thing—a step toward reform that I would like to see enacted and that we need to see enacted. But I disagree with the government shutdown at every point along the way, from the beginning to the end.
The fact of the matter is that, as a former chief of staff to the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I know that there is no way Congress can reform its way to an effective size.
I believe that Congress has to borrow more money to pay its bills, and that this borrowing needs to be temporary. There are two reasons for this temporary measure: first, because
