The One Reform America Needs

I feel particularly snarky today.  America needs just one reform to return to insure its greatness for all time and that is to regard something not working as an argument to end it in favor of a different tactic instead of an argument to do more of the same.

This is a bipartisan policy flaw.  On any number of policies such as immigration, the drug war, health reform, taxes, crime, home ownership, clean energy subsidies, some components of the stimulus plan, financial deregulation, and even oil production it seems that the abject failure of the popular policy to reach the objectives that led to it initially being adopted becomes not an argument to abandon the failed policy but instead an argument that we need to embrace more of it.

I don't have a strong explanation for this tendency.  Best I have is that proponents of a failed policy see the negative data coming in and early on seek to associate failed policies with the American way making the continuation of the policy an end rather than a means to whatever the original end was.

I'm open to other suggestions but I'm sincerely afraid that this dynamic has become the dominant one in American policy making.