A patch is not a plan

The Hill reports that the Senate advanced a bipartisan continuing resolution to fund the government at current levels through December 11 — a result both parties are calling a win. I will grant them the compliment, but only so far. Avoiding a shutdown is a genuine good. Mistaking the avoidance of a crisis for the resolution of one is a very old human habit, and a dangerous one.

In my printing days I knew shopkeepers who kept their doors open by rolling over one short note into the next, always meaning to settle accounts at the turn of the season. Some of them did settle. More of them did not. The note-roller's problem is not the interest — it is that the habit of deferral trains the mind away from discipline. A government that funds itself in three-month installments is training itself in the same bad habit.

The bill, The Hill tells us, funds at current levels — meaning no serious reckoning with what the nation is spending against what it is taking in. I have always held that a nation grows rich in the manner of a household: by producing more than it consumes and being honest about both. A continuing resolution is honest about neither. It simply photocopies last year's ledger and calls it a budget.

Democrats, the report says, expect a harder fight ahead on spending. I have no doubt of it. Every postponed argument grows fiercer in the postponing. The farmer who will not mend his fence in the spring spends the whole autumn chasing cattle. When December arrives, the same factions will be back at the same table, only more exhausted and more entrenched. The working family that pays its taxes in April will have no say in how that argument ends — but it will feel the consequence either way, in services reduced or in the slow tax of inflation that a loosely governed treasury always eventually imposes.

My counsel to the citizen watching this from a distance is not despair but vigilance. Demand of your representative a full accounting — not a continuing resolution, not a deadline extension, but an honest line-by-line answer to the question: what does the Republic spend, on what, and why? That is not an unreasonable demand. It is, in fact, the minimum a self-governing people ought to require. Write the letter. Make the call. The press that does not tend its type goes out of business; the Republic that does not tend its accounts goes the same way, only more slowly and more painfully.