My late wife often said that our family’s motto should be, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing the hard way.”

Marilyn was correct. I do complicate things. I prefer, though, to frame it as “playing for the long run.” While the long run is almost always the hard way, it is more permanent, or at least more likely to be permanent.

Still, in government and business, the easy way infects decisions at all levels. Take Congress. The last time it passed a budget was 2012. Instead, it gives us, year after year, a continuing series of continuing resolutions. The failure to fund government for a few weeks led to the three-day part closure (Jan. 20-22) of the government. And, Congress must do it all again in 11 days since the resolution that ended the closure expires Feb. 8.

In Maine, the LePage administration has taken the easy way out time and again. One example. The governor and his secretary of health and human services, Mary Mayhew, didn’t like the rules for spending 13.4 million federal dollars on families with children, so they spent it on the elderly and disabled. Not that the elderly and disabled couldn’t benefit, but that money came from Washington for another use. Mayhew and LePage took the easy way out, to get the results, and maybe the votes, they wanted. The hard way, or long-term, would have been to try to change the rules for federal welfare money.

In other cases, to be fair to the guv, Maine has tried to do things the right way. In an attempt to get EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer, what we used to call food stamps) benefits to actually nourish people, LePage asked the feds for permission to ban EBT use to buy soda and other junk foods. The feds said no, but Maine is appealing.

The easy way out doesn’t appeal just to pols. In 1990, I attended a seminar featuring a panel of businesses people. It was a private session, so I can’t name the panelists, but I can set out what they said. The moderator asked how each executive saw her business’s middle-term future.

The owner of an agricultural business saw modest growth but said growth was hemmed in by the clock. Her family had only 24 hours a person to work each day. Her family was also hemmed in by the calendar. The business needed five to seven years to get a new item going, so growth was slow. There was no easy way out.

Then, the superintendent of a huge corporation said of his company’s mid-range future. “For us, the long term is 180 days.” He said his company didn’t plan beyond half a year. It had invested millions upon millions of dollars in Maine. This short-range outlook means decisions made today will consider only the time until the end of July.

By the way, the family owned ag business is still going, the owner’s getting ready to retire. The huge stockholder-owned corporation has scaled back its operations in Maine.

More than ever, a college degree leads to financial success. And America has a strong record of making college and university accessible to almost anyone who wants to attend, though it has not done so well at turning students into graduates. But to get to that level of accessibility, we have, yet again, taken the easy way, financing college with loans from the feds or from lending agencies but guaranteed by the feds. It is not rare for graduates to owe more than $100,000.

It was not always thus. The federal government began lending money to students in 1965. As a first-year graduate student, I borrowed something like $235 from the National Defense Education Act program in 1968. I paid it off by 1972, while starting a family and buying our first house. But today, you can hear of young people who stay in college just to get the “free money” of student loans. They may be half-hearted students at best.

The universities and the feds took the easy way out. Throw some money at the colleges, and everything will be all right. But it isn’t. Kids are strapped with debt they cannot hope to repay. The hard way would be for colleges to admit fewer students and use their resources to help those fewer students with scholarships.

One consequence is the rise of for-profit colleges, some of them good options for kids but many of them mere scams to get at the huge pot of federal money for student loans.

Gun ownership is a perpetual argument. Opponents of the free flow of firearms have time and again gone to legislation to deal with what is framed as a constitutional issue.

Enter Brett Stephens, the most conservative of the New York Times’s columnists. Stephens wrote in October that the Second Amendment does not call for unfettered commerce in firearms. No doubt angering many of his fellow conservatives, he recites chapter and verse showing that there can, and in his estimation should, be limitations on gun ownership. Stephens argued that folks who favor limiting guns should go the constitutional route and try to repeal the Second Amendment. It would not be easy. We couldn’t even bring ourselves to adopt an amendment that said women and men are equal.

Stephens is proposing an ultimate hard way. If gun control is to be possible, it should be done by repealing the Second Amendment. Anything less is the easy way out.

He could have cited the anti-boozers. When prohibitionists wanted to end to the sale of alcoholic beverages, they took the long, tedious route of adopting the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. It lasted barely 13 years before opponents, no doubt financed by liquor barons, got it repealed in the 21st Amendment. But neither side took the easy way out.

I’ll drink to that.

Bob Neal lives in New Sharon. He does not expect to live long enough to see a genuine constitutional challenge to the Second Amendment.

Bob Neal

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