Some of society's most intractable problems come not from its failures but from its successes. Often you can't get a good thing without paying a bad price.

Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

WASHINGTON -- Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama told The Washington Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking -- racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way -- on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression.