This seems to be a classic problem in American political discourse, people immediately discount solutions for very serious problems that exist right now, due to (often extremely shaky) hypotheticals that might some day come to pass (usually with a massive heaping helping of slippery slope fallacy).
I disagree. We have evidence of this happening repeatedly. Income tax being the prime example.
I believe the problem is this: we hardly ever describe the end state. We don't define a metric that we look to achieve and then what we change about the policy when we've achieved it. So what happens is bloated bureaucracies become established and fight for self preservation, even if the mission they were on is complete.
