Americans now have one of the most unequal distributions of income and wealth in the industrialized world, yet they still aspire to making a number of ever-more expensive basic services — education, justice and health care — available to all citizens on roughly equal terms, even though that vision is not consistently realized in practice. The lofty vision inevitably implies transfers from the well-to-do to the lower-income strata.

Economist Uwe Rehinhardt has a good piece on the New York Times Economix blog outlining that a fundamental problem with our federal budget is that Americans want more services from the government than they’re willing to pay for. He’s less sure on the solutions…