Opposition To Spending Cuts Makes Taxes Higher Than They Otherwise Would Be

Yglesias: "taxes are irrelevant—money that’s spent will be paid for out of taxes. Spending cuts are both necessary and sufficient to reduce the long-term level of taxation. And since once spent money has to be repaid with interest, delay induces higher taxes."

Prosperity Is The Ultimate National Security Issue

Yglesias:

If you looked at the United States in 1935, our military was not particularly impressive compared to a more militarized country like Japan. But if you look at 1945, the United States beat Japan very badly in a war. And that’s primarily because the United States of America was way better at building ships and airplanes than Japan. We were better at breaking codes than Japan. We were better at researching nuclear fission bombs than Japan. We grew more food and we had more people. The fundamentals, in other words, were strong. And that’s the ultimate national security resource. The current level of defense spending has huge implications for a country’s capacity to do something like speedily mount a military intervention in Libya—America can do a lot, the EU can’t. But over the longer term, what matters most is the underlying fundamentals. The European Union has more people than the United States and a larger economic output, and could use those things to build a formidable national security apparatus if it wanted to.

Similarly, if you think about the national security landscape of 2035 what’s going to be really important isn’t the defense spending decisions of the United States. It’ll be the fundamentals. How rich are we? How many skills do our people have? How many people live here? How much science can we do? Insofar as expending resources on today’s security priorities prevents us from investing resources in building national capabilities for the future, we undermine our longer-term security.

Gridlock and Democracy and Accountability

Pundits in the media often compare government and business and complain that government should be run more like business.  A key difference between the two is that decision making in business is authoritarian whereas decision making in a democracy requires massive consensus building.  Democratic decisionmaking is less efficient (and slow) because of gridlock and the time required for consensusbuilding.  Dictatorships are hierarchical organizations that are run like businesses for the benefit of a leader or relatively small oligarchy of interests that can make decisions much more quickly than a democracy.  Even in the case of a corporation, most shareholders do not even vote and the real decisionmaking power rests with a relatively small oligarchy of wealthy managers, directors, and large shareholders who belong to the same class and have much more in common than the varied competing interest groups of a democracy.  Corporate oligarchies can much more quickly reach consensus when required because of their homogeneity.  Conservatives often criticize government for not being managed more like a business, but it was a conservative libertarian motive that initially led to the desire for institutions that would produce gridlock.  Too much democracy was feared to threaten the wealthy.  The majority might vote to make the wealthy minority pay progressive taxes.  
Perhaps a way to encourage reformation of our government would be to argue that a parliamentary government would be more businesslike.  It would appeal to conservative rhetoric and to the authoritarian impulses of conservatives, but smart elite libertarian conservatives would realize that it would actually mean more democratic accountability which would result in popular measures that would somewhat expand government at the expense of wealthy elites.   But their fears are exaggerated.  The US is already on track to expand government due to health trends and the difference between the US and parliamentary systems in the extent of government is much less than one would think.  Even the difference between democracies and dictatorships in government expenditures is so small that it is unclear if one system leads to greater taxation.  

Yglesias:

If major legislative change requires agreement between the leadership of both major political parties, then elections have very little efficacy in terms of determining policy outcomes. To my way of looking at it, that’s a bad thing because it undermines democratic accountability. ...democratic accountability is very important. People who win elections should govern, and if the results of their governance are bad they should lose power. That’s an incentive-compatible mode of governance. Something like “procedure nobody understands determines outcomes, and the party that doesn’t hold the White House benefits from bad results no matter who was responsible for them” is not.

Accountability is blame/credit. Who is accountable for the government shutdown? Who is accountable for TARP? Who is accountable for the fact that Abortion is not illegal? On all of these issues, both sides point fingers at the other side. In a parliamentary system, if your side wins and they do dumb things, then you throw them out. In our system, it is harder to know who is doing the dumb things unless one party has a majority of the house, 60% of the Senate, the presidency, and a majority of Supreme Court justices.