Starve the Beast and Stuff the Goose

I had a bit of an epiphany tonight. Remember "starve the beast," the Reaganite theory that the way to control the size of government was to keep cutting taxes until, finally, slashing of spending/programs becomes unavoidable? Well, the Dems have a mirror image of that: Call it "stuff the goose": create more and more entitlements without regard to costs until, finally, tax increases become unavoidable. The problem for those of us just trying to do the right thing is that when "starve the beast" collides with "stuff the goose," the outcome is simply ENORMOUS debt. I'm glad the health care bill passed. I really am. It's a start, I hope, on what is clearly the single most important and difficult domestic issue facing America. But to provide, at taxpayer expense, health care coverage for an additional 35 million people, and to thereby remove any incentive for these additional people to use health care resources responsibly, without doing anything meaningful about the costs and profoundly perverse incentives in the American health care system borders on the criminally irresponsible.