Senate Democrats Save Air Travelers and GOP from the Sequester | New Republic

Senate Democrats Save Air Travelers and GOP from the Sequester | New Republic: But there’s an even more important principle at work—which is that, once we’ve decided on spending cuts, the affluent must be made to understand that they lead to an increase in suffering. If they’re too insulated from the pain, they’ll be too eager to support more cuts in the future. (And by “too eager” I mean an eagerness to cut more than is justified by any economic rationale. I’m not suggesting that cuts per se are bad.) The logic here is similar to the moral logic of a military draft: The people who sit out the fighting shouldn’t labor under the delusion that wars are relatively costless, or that the costs are far-removed from their daily lives. A democracy can only function if most of us have skin in the game.1