The problem of income inequality: Day One

When I pledged to make 2011 the year of my reading about income inequality and the welfare state, I thought I’d be able to contain myself to, oh, a dozen or so really smart books—representing a range of viewpoints—to give me a solid grounding. And I thought I’d start with Paul Krugman’s now slightly dated 2007 book, “The Conscience of a Liberal.” What I didn’t realize is that once I started thinking about these related topics, I’d start seeing good reading on them everywhere.  There’s been lots of magazine articles and blog posts to take note of just in the first month of this project. So this month’s installment will also draw on some recent magazine articles — “The United States of Inequality” by Timothy Noah at Slate, “The Rise of the New Global Elite” by Chrystia Freeland at The Atlantic, and “Business Is Booming,” by Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect—as well as Tyler Cowen’s new mini e-book, “The Great Stagnation.” (Other sources will be cited, as needed.) Instead of reviewing Krugman, he is the jumping-off point for the project.

 My sources generally come from the left side of the spectrum. Obviously I do to. But I’m going to try not to put my thumbs on the scale, because my aim is to understand the issues and what solutions, if any, are best suited to resolving them. Which is why, in coming months, you’ll see texts from the right of center, as well.

 That said, I had a series of questions in my mind when I started reading, and I’m going to take them one-by-one each day this week.

* Is there an issue of growing income inequality in the United States?

Yes. Next question?

OK, let’s add some depth. Here’s what it boils down to: Since 1980, the United States economy has grown quite a bit — even when taking the recent Great Recession into account. But those gains have gone almost entirely to the country’s ultra-elite: 80 percent of the gains went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. Wages for everybody else, on the other hand, have more or less stagnated. Case closed.

Here is one of a million charts that make the case:

“In the 1980s, however, it gradually become clear that the evolution of America into a middle-class, politically middle-of-the-road nation wasn’t the end of the story,” Krugman writes. “A small number of people were pulling far ahead, while most Americans saw little or no economic progress …. those trends continue to this day: Income inequality is as high as it was in the 1920s, and political polarization is as high as it has ever been.”

I have a white whale no longer

Longtime readers will know of my continuing disdain for the work of NYT Magazine's Deborah Solomon. Looks like I'll have to find a new target for my ire:

"My immediate plan is to devote myself to my long-overdue, almost-finished biography of Norman Rockwell, which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I had eight great years writing the column, and I have been encouraged by the paper's top brass to continue writing for the paper. Naturally, I also plan to continue asking as many impertinent questions as possible."

The problem with Solomon's work wasn't that her questions were impertinent. It's that they were often impertinent for their own sake, journalism as a kind of masterbatory pugilism. As I wrote when I first got on my Deborah Solomon high horse, her interviews "are performance art pieces, designed to elicit discomfort in interviewees and readers to no good purpose at all." Good riddance.

 

Me @ Macworld: I review Rupert Murdoch's new The Daily

Announced on Wednesday, The Daily was touted by its creators at News Corp. as a rethinking of journalism for a new audience and new technology. There’s just one problem with the hype: Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper closely resembles other—often unsuccessful—attempts over the last decade to “reinvent“ the news. The only difference, from a user perspective, is that a few semi-new digital flourishes have been thrown into the mix.

via macworld.com

'Democracy' in Iraq

There's a lot to say about how American conservatives have been coming out of the woodwork to suggest that regime change in Iraq veeeeeeery slowly sparked the protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere around the Middle East in recent weeks. (A variant on this theme is offered by NRO's Jay Nordlinger, who writes: "It seems that a democratic revolution is sweeping the Middle East — spurred, I am sure, by American and allied actions in Iraq.")

So it's worth taking note of today's New York Times story that gives us a picture of what "democracy" in Iraq actually looks like:

Iraqi security forces controlled directly by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki continue to hold and to torture detainees in secret jails despite his vows last year to end such practices, according to a statement from Human Rights Watch released Tuesday.

The statement renewed longstanding criticism of Mr. Maliki that he has violated the Constitution by having some security forces in charge of pursuing terrorists report directly to his office. About 280 detainees are being held at Camp Justice, a military base in northern Baghdad, with no access to lawyers or their families, according to the report. They are being held by brigades that are supposed to report to the Defense Ministry, it said.

After the disclosure of a secret prison last year, Mr. Maliki said the detainees would be transferred to the Ministry of Justice, under which they were expected to receive proper legal representation. But Human Rights Watch, citing internal government documents and interviews conducted in Iraq with government officials and detainees, said that this has not occurred. 

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that Egyptians aren't really all that inspired by a US-backed "democratic" (remember, Maliki didn't actually win the last election) government that tortures its enemies. That's what they're protesting against! I'm guessing the sparks of the recent waves of protests involve a complicated set of kindling that I don't fully understand, but I do know that Iraq War apologists will never stop trying to extract "victory" from a very bad war.

 

The Inky takes on the death penalty

I'm just a touch perplexed by today's editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The ed board there is apparently extra-horrified by the way Ohio now plans to execute its death-row prisoners:

The continued practice of capital punishment got even more unsettling with Ohio's announcement that it will become the second state that executes convicts with a drug typically used to euthanize animals.

Pentobarbital is well-known to veterinarians, who use it to euthanize terminally ill pets.

Comparisons between executions and putting a pet out of its misery might be unfair, but they're unavoidable now. Some people call murderers "animals," which is how they will be treated when Oklahoma and Ohio dispatch them to eternity.

The whole apparatus of state-sanctioned executions is awful to comprehend, but even more so with the use of a drug pulled from your local vet's medicine cabinet.

I think the Inquirer is trying to say that the death penalty is bad, and I agree. But I don't get this particular set of quibbling. Is the death penalty really worse because states have exchanged one set of lethal chemicals for another? It's hard to see how. It would be one thing if the Inquirer wanted to argue the new chemicals will some how increase a convict's suffering during execution, but that's not what is being said here, and I'm not sure that's even the case. There are a host of reasons to believe that states shouldn't have the power of life or death over their citizens; I'm not sure that squeamishness is really going to rank that highly among them.

TSA backlash watch: Is the TSA getting it right?

Maybe the Transportation Security Administration is getting it, after all. The agency is debuting new body scanners that don't show so much ... body: 

The machines now produce a gray, cookie-cutter outline of the human form. The silhouette appears on a screen about the size of a laptop computer that is attached to the scanning booth.

If a passenger is cleared by the scan, the screen will flash green with an "OK." Suspicious items detected by the scanner appear as little boxes outlined in red, showing their location on generic front and back silhouettes on the screen.

Please do watch WaPo's video of TSA head John Pistole announcing the new scanner. Nice how they demonstrate it by showing a white woman going through the scanner without weapon — and a black man going through the scanner while concealing "suspicious objects." Way to be sensitive and avoid stereotypes, guys.

That said, this seems much less intrusive than the scanners that let airport officials see your nude body underneath your clothing. My family might be more willing to get on airplane if we aren't subjected to a virtual strip search prior to flying. But this technology is still in the testing phase; we'll see how long it takes to get all the way to Philadelphia

 

 

The Daily News takes on 'power' in Philadelphia

Still love the Daily News, and Lord knows I hate bullies. Still, I can't help but feel a bit off-put by this story in today's paper:

Upper Darby police yesterday arrested a seventh and final teen in a horrific bullying incident caught on video, and Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said the tough guy was crying and vomiting when he was brought to the police station.

The 14-year-old was charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault and related offenses for allegedly being one of seven boys who shoved 13-year-old Nadin Khoury (right) in a tree and hung him on a fence on Jan. 11, police said. The entire incident was videotaped by one of the attackers on a cell phone, according to police.

I'm glad the kid is being brought to justice. But budding thug though he may be, he's still just a kid. And it just seems weird and unseemly for a major metropolitan newspaper to use its platform to mock an adolescent. The DN is ostensibly siding against bullies -- and I'm with them! -- but it ends up acting like a big bully itself. Uncool.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: The gross-out wars begin

Tobias has added aggressive licking to his arsenal. I may or may not have taught him that, but I'm certainly living with the consequences.

I'm not feeling well, so I settled down for a nap this afternoon. Tobias crawled under the blanket with me, but apparently didn't want me to sleep -- he put his head next to mine and, not getting a response, did the unexpected: He ran his tongue up and down my nose.

I laughed, but apparently it's not a one-time thing. A little later, after I'd gotten up, he came over and licked my knee. So I grabbed his hand and stuffed it in my mouth.

"Dat's gwoss," he told me. He's learning.

Rendell, Bissinger, and the changes at the Philadelphia Daily News

There's a lot of ground to cover in Larry Platt's memo to the staff of the Philadelphia Daily News. So I'll just stick with saying this sounds good....

In covering Power, the Daily News should report from street level, poking the reader in the ribs and telling him or her how things really do or don’t get done in this city. Philadelphia is a town that is run for and by the same group of 300 insiders. We have an obligation to provide a road map for our readers as to how the transactional nature of our town can conspire against the common good. And we can do that in an entertaining way that holds the usual suspects accountable. 

...but I can't help but juxtapose that mission statement with this: 

I’m also honored to announce that another Pulitzer Prize winner, best-selling author Buzz Bissinger, will serve as an editorial advisor and occasional columnist in our pages. I’ve known Buzz for nearly twenty years; he’s passionate and inspiring and often outraged. I plan on having some regular big-picture brainstorming sessions, often with Buzz in attendance. Yes, he cut his teeth at the Inquirer, and, until recently, penned a column for our sister publication. But Buzz is excited about what we’re doing here and his is a voice our city desperately needs.

Speaking of loud voices, I also want to welcome our new sports columnist, none other than Ed Rendell. 

Ah, yes, Ed Rendell and Buzz Bissinger. Such fresh, establishment-challenging voices! If Larry Platt weren't giving us these guys, how would I know what they think or where to find their views?

I've been in the business long enough to have read a few of these memos. (And to have written one or two myself, frankly.) Revolutions are often promised but rarely realized. But it's not usually so naked that the promise of great change and reinvention is accompanied by fanfare of drawing from the same well that you've been drawing from for the last 25 years. 

Bernd Eichinger, maker of 'Neverending Story' and 'Downfall,' RIP

It's a heck of an expansive moviemaking resumé: Bernd Eichinger, who just died at age 61, was a writer or producer on "The Neverending Story" the "Resident Evil" franchise and some of Wim Wenders' earliest movies. But the movie that probably touched the deepest chord with me was "Downfall," Eichinger's film about Hitler's last days, as the Soviet army closed in around him. The controversy around the movie is remembered in his obit today: 

“Downfall” (2004), which was written as well as produced by Mr. Eichinger (and was also nominated for an Oscar), tells the story of Hitler’s final days, portraying life with his close compatriots in his Berlin bunker.

Based partly on a memoir by one of Hitler’s secretaries and partly on historical texts, the film, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, portrayed Hitler in an almost neutral fashion. It depicted his paranoid rantings as Berlin was under assault by Russian artillery and the Germans faced certain defeat, but also featured moments of warmth and thoughtfulness. Many critics, especially inside Germany, felt that any attempt to humanize Hitler was ill advised.

“The lack of narrative position alone,” the filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote, escorts the audience “into a black hole in which they are led, almost unnoticeably, toward looking at this time through the eyes of the perpetrators, and generates a kind of benevolent understanding of them.”

Mr. Eichinger rejected such criticism, saying in a 2005 interview that the Nazi period was the “darkest” in German history and that it “traumatized not only the generation which was involved, but traumatized also my generation.” He added that to attack the film for showing that Hitler had human traits was unjust.

“There is no such thing as telling the truth and not taking everything into consideration,” he said. “Otherwise you are a Stalinist with one view of things. You burn what doesn’t fit your position or put it into the archives because you want to show only bad and good. When I wrote this script, for me the important thing was to show the gray.”

Watching "Downfall" didn't make me feel sympathy to Hitler, nor to any of the people in his cadre. But it did make me feel a small twinge of empathy for the people around him. Yes, these people committed themselves to a horrible and monstrous ideology — but they were people, after all. I took the depiction of them as a warning about how easy it is to commit oneself to misguided or even hideous dogmas, even with the best of intentions, and how difficult it can be to extract oneself from those visions even as they cause the world to crumble about you. Few people think of themselves as evil. Instead, they operate the gas ovens and the furnaces  and convince themselves that they may be doing difficult work, but they are doing it for a greater good. Eichinger's movie didn't make me want to be a Nazi; it made me see how easy it would be to be a Nazi, and provided a warning against slipping down that slope. It was cinematic art at its most thought-provoking and valuable. RIP.

 

Today in inequality reading: Egypt

A big reason for the unrest in Egypt? The widening gap between the rich and the poor:

“These big guys are stealing all the money,” said Mohamed Ibraham, a 24-year-old textile worker standing at his second job as a fruit peddler in a hard-pressed neighborhood called Dar-al-Salam. “If they were giving us our rights, why would we protest? People are desperate.”

He had little sympathy for those frightened by the specter of looting. He complained that he could barely afford his rent and said the police routinely humiliated him by shaking him down for money, overturning his cart or stealing his fruit. “And then we hear about how these big guys all have these new boats and the 100,000 pound villas. They are building housing, but not for us — for those people up high.”

The widening chasm between rich and poor in Cairo has been one of the conspicuous aspects of city life over the last decade — and especially the last five years. Though there were always extremes of wealth and poverty here, until recently the rich lived more or less among the poor — in grander apartments or more spacious apartments but mixed together in the same city.

In the next few days, I'll start summing up some of my first impressions from the opening month of my year of income inequality-welfare state reading. The United States isn't Egypt, in any number of ways, but it still seems that Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale to our own elites. Widening income inequality -- a system in which the rich get richer and everyone else gets left behind -- is ultimately destabilizing over time. America's own problems with a growing income chasm aren't just a problem for the middle class and poor; they could end up being a problem for everybody. Don't kid yourselves: It could happen here. 

Today in inequality reading: Egypt

A big reason for the unrest in Egypt? The widening gap between the rich and the poor:

“These big guys are stealing all the money,” said Mohamed Ibraham, a 24-year-old textile worker standing at his second job as a fruit peddler in a hard-pressed neighborhood called Dar-al-Salam. “If they were giving us our rights, why would we protest? People are desperate.”

He had little sympathy for those frightened by the specter of looting. He complained that he could barely afford his rent and said the police routinely humiliated him by shaking him down for money, overturning his cart or stealing his fruit. “And then we hear about how these big guys all have these new boats and the 100,000 pound villas. They are building housing, but not for us — for those people up high.”

The widening chasm between rich and poor in Cairo has been one of the conspicuous aspects of city life over the last decade — and especially the last five years. Though there were always extremes of wealth and poverty here, until recently the rich lived more or less among the poor — in grander apartments or more spacious apartments but mixed together in the same city.

In the next few days, I'll start summing up some of my first impressions from the opening month of my year of income inequality-welfare state reading. The United States isn't Egypt, in any number of ways, but it still seems that Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale to our own elites. Widening income inequality -- a system in which the rich get richer and everyone else gets left behind -- is ultimately destabilizing over time. America's own problems with a growing income chasm aren't just a problem for the middle class and poor; they could end up being a problem for everybody. Don't kid yourselves: It could happen here. 

Philly police: Probably worse than you think

God, I love the Philadelphia Daily News:

THE NUMBER of complaints against Philadelphia police officers has spiked in the past few years, yet getting a complaint form isn't always as easy as it's supposed to be.

At times, officers at some police-district headquarters pressure complainants for personal information regarding the complaint, and provide misinformation or even deny them the form needed to file a complaint.

In spot checks conducted recently by the Daily News, supervisors at five police districts refused to allow the complainant to remain anonymous - which is against the Police Department's own policy - and wouldn't supply the form to reporters who posed as complainants.

An additional 11 of the city's 21 police districts did not follow department policies for filing complaints. Problems included creating a hostile environment for complainants, and neglecting to inform them of the procedure and locations to file a complaint.

Not that this is shocking, but what this likely means is that all the arrests and firings of Philadelphia cops in recent years probably represents just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption and abuses of official power. The stuff we've heard about is just the stuff that was successfully reported and investigated. Doesn't it seem likely there are a lot more problems that never draw official notice because citizens either A) don't bother or B) get the runaround?

Social media vacation

I'm taking a break from Twitter and Facebook until Monday. Sometimes a mental cleanse is required.

This new highway is brought to you by Big Brother

In a somewhat intriguing article arguing for private funding of new road and infrastructure projects, AEI's R. Richard Geddes makes this following aside:

More toll-funded roads wouldn't necessarily mean more toll plazas clogging our highways. Advanced satellite tracking technologies allow "open road" tolling, in which motorists would be charged per mile of road used--just as consumers are charged per kilowatt hour for electricity, per gallon of water, or per minute of cell phone use--without the backup at the toll booth. Private investors have the resources to utilize this new technology.

It might be a bit late in the game to make this complaint-slash-observation, but I'm not really sure that I'd want some governmental-business partnership tracking every place I drive with a satellite. We're increasingly trackable thanks to our cell phones and standard in-car technologies at this point, so the horse may be out of the barn, but the idea still gives me the creeps.

 

Challenger

Tucked in a drawer somewhere around here, I have an autographed picture of Judith Resnik. During the early 1980s, while other kids were swooning to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," I was writing fan letters to astronauts. And one of the original astronauts -- John Young, who'd flown on Gemini and Apollo and the first space shuttle -- had been kind enough to respond with a stack of autographed pictures. His own, for one. Guion Bluford, the first African-American in space, for another. And Resnik, the second American woman in space. I treasured these photos, would pull them out and stare at them, but return them carefully to their package when I was done. I was never a baseball card collector, but I understood the impulse.

Resnik was the "other woman" aboard the shuttle Challenger, when it blew up 25 years ago today. Most people remember the teacher Christa McAuliffe, understandably; her presence on the doomed flight, as an amateur among risk-taking professionals, compounded the sense of tragedy. But I felt more connected to Resnik. Her autographed photo had created a connection between us, in my mind. And while I would've been upset by the explosion, the fact that I possessed something she'd once touched enhanced my own personal sense of devastation.

Weird thing, though, is that I never cried about it. Not until 10 years later, in 1996, when I caught a TV special commemorating the anniversary of Challenger's demise. It was only then -- as an adult, in my first full-time newspaper job -- that I broke down and sobbed. I was probably weeping for myself; the explosion was the beginning of the end of my intensely held childhood dream, after all. I am not an astronaut, and I will never slip the surly bonds. 

But Judy Resnik did. 

Can free markets save Afghanistan?

There's a suggestion of the sort in Sen. Marco Rubio's piece over at National Review:

And if their people are to establish businesses and attract long-term economic development investments that help wean them off the opium trade, Afghanistan must become a country where basic property and commercial laws are respected and enforced.

Now, Rubio is a bit of a Tea Party darling, but this is the first time I've heard hint of anybody trying to apply Tea Party philosophy to the war in Afghanistan. And I'd really like to see him expand on this theme. My initial reaction is that lots of Afghans are, in fact, responding to market forces by growing the opium that the West uses-slash-finds-so-problematic. Beyond that, though, I've not really heard that property right issues are a particular problem in a land where the central government is corrupt and ineffective. If there's a substantive critique to be made along these lines, I'd really be interested in seeing it. Admittedly, I suspect it's a throwaway line that doesn't actually mean anything.

Does gridlock defeat special interests, or serve them?

At the Cato Institute, Marcus Ethridge writes (PDF) a celebration of good old-fashioned government gridlock. By making government so inefficient, he says, you make it unlikely that special interests can dominate the decision-making process:

A large and growing body of evidence makes it clear that the public interest is most secure when governmental institutions are inefficient decisionmakers. An arrangement that brings diverse interests into a complex, sluggish decisionmaking process is generally unattractive to special interests. Gridlock also neutralizes some political benefits that producer groups and other well-heeled interests inherently enjoy. By fostering gridlock, the U.S. Constitution increases the likelihood that policies will reflect broad, unorganized interests instead of the interests of narrow, organized groups.

This seems overly optimistic to me. It assumes that "well-heeled interests" don't understand how to employ the levers of power in negative fashion as well as positive ones. The United States Senate tried for decades to pass civil rights legislation--like anti-lynching laws--only to be frustrated time and again by a band of Southerners who used the filibuster to great effect. In that case, there was broad-based recognition in American society that it was bad to kill black people, but the filibuster served the purpose of protecting Southern white guys. Who was the "special interest" in that case?

Ethridge never once uses the word "filibuster" in his piece, though, celebrating instead on the checks and balances provided in the Constitution--the filibuster isn't in there--and bemoaning the rise of the regulatory state. I'm not really sure how you honestly examine gridlock (and deride the "rent seeking" associated with unelected regulators making rules for the rest of us) without dealing with the ramifications of the filibuster. There's an argument to be made that the filibuster so constrains Congress that the legislative branch has ended up deferring to executive branch rulemakers to get stuff done instead of doing their jobs. The framers of the Constitution may have created a limited government, but they also wanted it to be energetic. The filibuster, as currently used, is a gridlocked step too far. And I see little evidence it serves anybody but small interest groups.

Commencing a Mark Steyn freakout in 3 ... 2 ...

Apparently jihadists aren't going out-baby us all into sharia law:

Globally, Muslims now make up 23.4 percent of the population, and if current trends continue, will be 26.4 percent by 2030. Such growth is not enough to create a drastic shift in the world’s religious balance, experts said. The world’s Christian population has been estimated in other reports to be 30 percent to 33 percent.

Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics at Princeton and a consultant for Pew on global Islam, said that the report could challenge assertions by some scholars and far-right political parties about future demographic domination by Muslims.

“There’s this overwhelming assumption that Muslims are populating the earth, and not only are they growing at this exponential rate in the Muslim world, they’re going to be dominating Europe and, soon after, the United States,” she said. “But the figures don’t even come close. I’m looking at all this and wondering, where is all the hysteria coming from?”

In the United States, the Muslim population might someday be as high as 1.7 percent of the population. There's this wild-eyed segment of conservatives who believe that every single American Muslim is a secret radical bent on establishing a caliphate to make all of us grow beards, wear burkhas and stop watching HBO. Even if that was true -- uh, it's not -- the numbers simply don't bode well for that proposition.

Scott Rigell, the defense budget, and a Constitutional cop-out

Near the end of the New York Times' story about the desire of some Tea Party Republicans to cut the defense budget, I came across this striking passage:

Representative Scott Rigell, a Republican newcomer from Virginia who at first sparred with the Tea Party but then signed a pledge supporting many of its positions, said that he, too, was committed to a strong military and the spending it required. In an interview after the hearing, he said that “as a very first priority, it is our constitutional duty to stand an army.”

You hear a lot of this sort of thing from hawks who want to cut Medicare but continue pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a bloated defense budget, so it might be a good idea to understand how Rigell wrongly invokes the Constitution to avoid a hard discussion about the proper size of the defense budget.

First of all, the Constitution empowers Congress to raise an army and a navy, it's true, but it doesn't actually create a duty (that is, if I'm reading Rigell properly, a requirement) to do so. In fact, it limits army appropriations to just two years at a time. Why? So that the Congress can frequently discuss whether the size and footing of that army is appropriate to the needs of the nation.In Federalist 24, after all, Alexander Hamilton writes "that clause which forbids the appropriation of money for the support of an army for any longer period than two years a precaution ... will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity."

"Evident necessity."  Read, oh, Federalist 23 through 29, and the idea of "evident necessity" becomes clear: The Founders wanted the European powers to keep their mitts off the United States and its territories. (They also wanted a strong navy to protect American mercantile shipping.) Since Tea Partiers and Republicans continually raise the topic of the Founders' vision for America, it's worth emphasizing very strongly: The United States current defense posture -- one in which we have so many bases around the world that we've literally lost count -- is light years away from what the Founders articulated. They were fighting fears that the U.S. military would become so large that it could oppress the American people; they didn't even consider the idea of bestriding the entire globe.

Just for emphasis, though, let's rejoin Hamilton in Federalist 26. 

The legislature of the United States will be obliged, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. ... The provision for the support of a military force will always be a favorable topic for declamation. As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition; and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.

Finally, in Federalist 28, Hamilton suggests that Americans don't need to worry about the military getting too big for its britches. "We should recollect that the extent of the military force must, at all events, be regulated by the resources of the country. " 

The debate over defense spending doesn't end with a listing of Congress' enumerated powers, in other words. The Founders wanted us to debate that spending, vigorously. They expected that the size of military would be kept in line with the actual need to defend the (ugh) homeland, and reined in if the military was getting too large. And they expected that the size and power of the military would be constrained by our national ability to spend money on that military. There are indications on all fronts that the American government in the 21st century is running afoul of all those ideas. Congrats to Tea Partiers who are sincere enough in their vision to go down this road. And watch out for Republicans who mutter the words "Constitutional duty" in order to short-circuit a very needed debate.