There’s been much commentary about cutting government spending lately. I have a few thoughts:

• Any large opaque organization is going to have wasteful spending and people who know how to attach themselves to profit off of it. The US government is no exception.
• It’s comforting to believe that those who attach themselves to government & government entities to profit from it are ONLY from the Other Team and never from our team of Truth and Justice. Dream on.
• Because it’s comforting to believe in the evil of people we disagree with it’s easy to believe every claim of evil made of them.
• When it comes to government spending its worth asking, “Is this it in our country’s interest to do this?” Recognizing what is truly in our country’s interest is harder work than many assume.
• Asking whether something is in our country’s interest should be asked when programs are started and regularly as they are continued.
• As a Christian I can recognize that wealth, though often something that results from taking advantage of others, can at least occasionally be a blessing from God, and is something we’re accountable for. If a country takes its wealth to be a blessing from God, then reading the Bible leads me to believe that our wealth is not just FOR us to consume on ourselves but for us to be agents of blessing to those with less. I DO NOT expect non-Christians to think this way.
• The annual budget deficit and the accumulation of our large national debt is not a good thing. Neither is it in our national interest. If this were the condition in my household the solution would be a combination of spending less and bringing in more.
• What Yuval Levin calls the “Wilsonian” inclination (after Woodrow Wilson) to have a strong executive led by experts with the authority to Make The Right Things Happen has not been a good thing for our country, whichever party has been practicing it. That inclination ignores the fact that building trust across the electorate and among the citizenry as a whole – rather than just pleasing the base – is a good thing.