Politicians promise us things to get our votes today and leave office knowing that their successors will have to tax our children to pay for them tomorrow.

And Americans have fallen for this for decades.

Thus, today's voters find themselves supporting cities that are cutting services to pay pensions, a West Virginia that plans to sap the next couple of generations to pay state pension and retirement benefits, and a nation that is $16 trillion into debt.

It's time for Americans to stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Shortsighted government puts liberty itself at risk.

The current administration in Washington, for example, does not even believe in the curbs set forth in the Constitution to limit its power.

As West Virginians have seen in the case of the coal industry, having failed to persuade the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to pass a coal-killer energy bill, President Obama simply gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the power to take such action itself.

Anyone who wants to stop this high-handed rule by unaccountable regulators must sue his rulers at his own very great expense.

Health care? Democrats gave a nation reeling from recession a multitrillion-dollar new entitlement - all by themselves. Not a single Republican voted for this outrageous power grab.

And in the laughably named Affordable Care Act, Democrats revealed that they know exactly what needs to be done, right down to the individual patient in the smallest hamlet in the land. There are boards and commissions for that. Really?

This is not only not how the system is supposed to work, it's dangerous. It has to be stopped.

The Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution, on the other hand, were farsighted, and they're looking wiser by the minute.

They established a government that separated powers to thwart such abuses of power.

Thomas Jefferson:

• "Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

• "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government."

• "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

• "I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared."

• "If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy."

• "We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves: and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life [expectancy] of the majority."

James Madison, on the separation of powers:

• "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

The Founders made more sense in the late 1700s than American government makes today. They tried to head off what we face.

They would be astonished by it, but they Google well. More people ought to visit them, just for perspective on today's dangerous drift toward national failure.