The Budget's Too Much with You

With apologies to Wordsworth, a well-known conservative emailed the following sonnet to The Scrapbook “Expressing Concern with Republicans’ Tendency to Revert to a Green-Eyeshade Obsession with Trivial Spending Cuts.” Here’s hoping this will stiffen congressional spines for going after larger game, like entitlement reform.

The budget’s too much with you; late and soon,

Obsessed with spending, you lay waste your powers:

Little we see in ideas that are ours;

You risk squandering your broad mandate, a sordid boon!

Defense cuts that bare our bosom to the moon;

The bold reforms that should be pushed at all hours,

But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

In this, it worries me, you may be out of tune;

This moves you not.—Great God! I’d rather be

A supply-sider suckled in a creed outworn;

Then might I, sipping my fresh-brewed tea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Jack Kemp rising from the sea;

Or hear old Reagan blow his wreathed horn.