AIM HIGH.(Air Force deal with Boeing to lease refuelling tankers)

Once upon a time, Americans believed that they should buy only what they could pay for. Debt was seen as dangerous, even immoral. This changed in the nineteen-twenties. Amid a boom in mass-produced consumer goods--washing machines, radios, couches, cars--people saw the appeal of buying on the installment plan. Retailers sang the virtues of "deferred payments you'll never miss," which made it "easy to get these things, right now when you need them." By the end of the decade, buying certain goods outright was for fussbudgets and nabobs.

The democratization of credit was clearly a wonderful thing. But it had certain consequences that retailers prefer not to mention. Buying on the installment plan is almost always more expensive. ("No money down" means "a lot more money later.") Generally speaking, if you have the money you're better off paying cash. People who buy couches on the installment plan tend to be people who can't afford them up front. This is why so many rent-to-own stores are in poor neighborhoods. And slicing a debt into incremental payments makes it easy to disguise just how big that debt is. (How else could rent-to-own stores stay in business?) If easy credit sometimes leads people to make reckless decisions, it's even more dangerous for governments, which constantly wrestle with the temptation to buy stuff today and make someone else pay for it tomorrow.

Apparently, the Air Force never got the memo. It's now trying to close a deal with Boeing in which it will lease a hundred planes to use as refuelling tankers for six years. Then, presumably, it will buy them. (It needs the approval of the Senate Armed Services Committee before it can sign the contracts.) The Congressional Budget Office estimates that simply purchasing the planes would cost sixteen billion dollars. Leasing and then purchasing them will cost at least six billion more. So why, when the defense budget is close to half a trillion dollars, is the Air Force acting like a deadbeat shopping for a couch at a Rent-a-Center?

In part, it's a familiar story of corporate welfare in the "iron triangle" (Congress, defense contractors, the Pentagon). The deal was conceived almost two years ago, in some measure as a handout to Boeing, which was struggling after September 11th. It was slipped into a congressional appropriations bill at the last minute, without any congressional hearings or even a formal request from the Air Force. And though it had come under withering criticism from the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office, lawmakers like John McCain, and numerous taxpayer watchdog groups on the left and the right, it survived, helped along by the ardent lobbying campaign of Boeing and its congressional allies (again on the left and the right). And the Air Force official with whom Boeing was negotiating the deal last year left this year to work for, yes, Boeing.

What makes this deal ...