Quote:
Originally Posted by MTUpower
Has the government gotten larger or smaller in it's reach, size, budgets, expenses, debt, or future promises in the last 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?
I'd say you have it backwards: the pro government crowd has won and gov continues to get bigger. Nearly all entities want to grow and expand their sphere of influence and governments are not immune to this; indeed they are one of the primary examples of it's truth...
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That's true, government spending continues to grow. The anti-government attitude I'm referring to shows up in other ways. Reagan, for example, appointed James Watt, a rather zealous opponent of environmental protection laws, as Secretary of the Interior. It was Reagan's prerogative to do that, but it showed an anti-government attitude. Likewise with Reagan's choice of Ed Meese to be Attorney General. His mission, it seems, was to find ways to ensure that pesky regulations concerning public benefits and other laws they didn't like were not enforced. Fast forward to 2010, and we have the Minerals Management Service allowing off-shore oil rig operators to fill out their own inspection reports in pencil so the inspectors could just trace over them in pen and sign off. We have deregulation every where you look, often leading to disastrous consequences. There's this constant effort to get government off the backs of the people. That's a worthy goal, but government needs to be on the backs of certain people.
It's all part of an anti-government attitude that Reagan made popular. It hasn't resulted in smaller government, but it has resulted in stupider government, IMHO.