If you want to walk a thousand miles you do it one step at a time. If you want to eat an elephant you do it one bite at a time. The genius of big government is that Congress believes that since there are more than 500 of them they can swallow any elephant-sized problem in one bite time after time. They forget that putting two geniuses to work on one problem does not double their IQ nor guarantee that their solution will be twice as good. Not only do they forget that but they go further and assume that 100 Senators must produce legislation that is 100 times as good as what any one of them would propose, that 400 Representatives will produce a law 400 times as good as what one of them would come up with, and that the combined efforts of the House and the Senate will generate results better than what either chamber had passed in isolation.
It took Congress a couple of weeks to generate a 169 page bill spending $700 Billion in TARP (that’s $4 Billion per page) in order to save our financial system. Another $787 Billion in ARRA took up 400 pages to save our economy. They spent more time, but they have so far managed to propose a Health Care Overhaul that is over 1000 pages. Our tax code does not look like a very long novel, despite what some people might think. It actually looks like a set of encyclopedias.
I am coming to the conclusion that one of the virtues of small government is that they might be more inclined to take problems one step at a time, producing legislation that is understandable. Perhaps if we were to insist upon smaller pieces of legislation, rather than one omnibus “solution” after another our government might atrophy to a more manageable size.
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