. . . the Wall Street Journal, you should make haste to your nearest news vendor and purchase today's paper. Paul Gigot and his merry band of editorial inksters celebrate with two special editorials, snips from editorials from the musty past, and best of all, short essays from eleven WSJ contributors on how to renew America.
The answer to our current slow growth and self-doubt isn't a set of magical "new ideas" or some unknown orator from the provinces. The answer is to rediscover the eternal truths that have helped America escape malaise and turmoil in the past.
The other editorial ("Freedom's Indispensable Nation") is about America's international responsibilities.
The world is taking note that America and its President are in retreat, and the consequences are already apparent.
Even better than the editorials -- excellent though they are -- are the eleven essays under the headline, "Ideas for Renewing American Prosperity." Consider this from George P. Shultz ("Return to Constitutional Government"):
Don't you think it's also about time Congress lived up to its constitutional dudties derived from the power of the purse? Continuing resolutions are a total cop-out. The way to build a budget is to set a framework and then work from the bottom up: Hold hearings, understand what the departments and agencies are doing, and help set priorities.That way, the budget will be up-to-date, and such a process, which is in large part operational in character, will get everyone into more of a problem-solving mode. So, better budgeting will also reduce knee-jerk partisanship.
He's as right as it is possible to be.
An honest budgeting process would, no surprise, create a better budget. But it would also have many collateral benefits. Among other things, it would encourage the freebooters who run the IRS to be more forthcoming about the unlawful targeting of conservative groups. And it would give Congress leverage to encourage the president to do the right thing by the Keystone Pipeline.
What Mr. Shultz doesn't have space to explain, however, is that Congress's failure to write budgets is neither an accident nor a consequence of gridlock. Many budgets were written by a divided Congress.
The refusal to write budgets is deliberate policy, the work of Harry Reid, acting for Barack Hussein Obama. Progressives are very interested in spending money. They are not at all interested in writing budgets. This notwithstanding candidate Obama's earnest promise of 2008 to go through the budget line-by-line to ferret out waste, fraud, and abuse. This promise, like so much else, was cynical -- a con, a lie.
To write a budget from the ground up would force Senators to vote for and against every blessed program and boondoggle, which the Democrats sincerely do not wish to do. The House continues to write budgets. The Senate has quit.
What Congress does instead, by necessity, is wave a cost-plus wand over last year's budget, upping it by some generous percentage. The message: Keep on keeping on; just do more of it.
In addition, no good crisis ever goes to a waste. The president and his progressive allies repeatedly demand even more money to fix this, that, and the other -- most recently the flood of immigrant children from Central America.
Never mind that Mr. Obama has roughly zero idea about how to fix anything in the real world. The one thing he can do, however, is engorge the Leviathan state, which is his primary goal anyway.
For more good ideas, buy today's Wall Street Journal and cut out pages A14 and A15. You will be richly rewarded.
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