Okay, build the cottage. Which do you think your mother-in-law will like the most, the sewer that backs up because it wasn’t built to code, when she gets sick because the chemicals used to treat the lumber are carcinogenic, or when it catches fire because there’s no one to set standards and license electricians?
Maybe none of those things would happen. Maybe even with zoning, and permits, and approvals they still will. Government isn’t perfect, but there are reasons for what it tries to do.
this is falling into the trap of seeing “government” as one big, monolithic, opaque entity. Immigration is under the purview of the federal government. Zoning/permits are a city-level thing, or county if you’re in an unincorporated area. The two have ZERO to do with each other so bitching about illegals because you need a permit to build an addition just makes you look ignorant. The Department of Homeland Security and Customs & Border Protection don’t know or care one whit about you putting a “mother-in-law suite” on your house, and your city council can’t give your job to an immigrant.
I know very well that it is different parts of the government, but the ones that have the easiest time finding you are generally precisely the parts you wish would just leave you alone. And the parts that you need aren’t there when you need them and are often completely unsympathetic to your concerns.
I’m not trying to argue about strict accuracy here, just the perceptions that lead people to hate big government. It’s actually not as bad as it was when I was a kid. back then, the general view of government was that they took great glee in harassing the law abiding and didn’t care how many dangerous criminals they let walk the streets. Ironically, Republicans are part of the reason people like government at least a little better than they used to. Republicans reformed the IRS and won the arguments on crime, gun control, and the right to self defense.
well, then if you hate “big government” because it can’t cater to your every whim and only do what you personally approve of, you will hate pretty much every form of government on this planet.
and when your “perceptions” don’t line up with reality, your perceptions can be ignored.
Not in a democracy they can’t. The way to change the perception is to deliver better government services and not keep on going to the public to ask for more money. In theory, governments should never have to do that since revenues grow with the economy. Having to go to the citizenry to ask for more money frequently is a sign of poor performance.
Nobody advocates for “big government” because a bigger government is not the end goal. It is a result of expanding or creating certain parts of government.
Because for the last 50 years the Republicans have been working to convince low information voters that the sole purpose of government is to take away your hard earned money and give it to “them.”
With “them” being any undeserving, disliked or ethnic population that they think you already hate.
Add to that that most people don’t have any idea what government actually does and you have your answer. Remember the “Keep Government out of my Medicare” signs?
That’s why you haven’t seen the great projects of the past replicated and probably never will. Rural electrification, the Eisenhower Freeway system, Apollo. Name anything since 1970 that you could add to that list. It used to be government could do great things because people were happy and proud to be a part of something like that. Now we can’t even keep our infrastructure from crumbling out from under us, much less do anything truly meaningful.
Because the government is the enemy, you know.
Everyone keeps talking about taxes as the main issue with big government but in my experience with blue collar semi-rural voters the main issue is with regulation and bureaucracy. People complain about taxes, when they are raised, but after that they become the new normal.
When the small town diesel mechanic starts looking at building a new shop and realizes he needs $500,000 in environmental and safety improvements, that’s the news that really flies around the coffee shop, and everyone has a similar story.
I know of a junk yard that has to have its front parking lot pressured washed twice a year because they found heavy metals in the parking lot. The junk cars have always been stored in the back and couldn’t be the problem. The front parking lot buts up to a high traffic road, and nobody ever tests the road. On top of that, they don’t require that the pressure washing water be captured so it’s just going down the drain.
So the junk yard owner is partially paying through taxes for someone to test his parking lot and fully paying for pressure washing road dust off his parking lot. As near as we can tell the only reason he has to do this is that it’s a junk yard and the regs were probably meant to cover the actual scrap yard but that doesn’t matter.
That’s the kind of stuff people get cranky about.
That’s it. Pretty rare to hear folk demand the elimination of services they perceive themselves as directly benefitting from.
Big government is such a flabby word. Are you talking about centralized federal government? Or Illinois - with many times more local and statewide taxing authorities than any other state? The military? How could anyone support invading Iraq if they didn’t support big government?
Folk still talk about Reagan as a supporter of small government - how much was spending and the federal workforce reduced under him? Moreover, what has the trend in gov’t workforce been over the past couple of decades? (Hint - it hasn’t been getting larger!)
In my experience, people generally want pretty damned big govt when it comes to services they want. They just want someone else to pay for it, and they don’t want to support services other folk desire. They also have selective memory, recalling the instances when they perceive themselves as inconvenienced, while forgetting the countless day-to-day ways in which “big government” supported their lifestyle.
Disclaimer on edit - I’ve been sucking at the federal teat these past 30 yrs.
You’re on to something here. Folks always love a good “dumb government enforcer” story. And love to post it, share it, etc.
But the larger issue is questioning the value of communal regulations at all. Which can be a problem as I recently wrote about in another thread here:
I live in the Bible Belt. *Everyone * here wants smaller government. But they always applaud federal money for local roads, parks, airports… turn down some federal money and I’ll believe you folks.
I came up with an argument a while back for why tax cuts and spending cuts make this worse:
You know what a basal metabolic rate is in biology? Every government has a basal metabolic rate, as it were–a basic upkeep cost just to stay in power. If you cut away services, the populace still have to pay for the upkeep. But the amount of services they get, and the number who get services at all, goes down at a faster rate than the tax bill.
So if you cut total government spending by 30%, but the “BMR” was 20% of government spending, the “useful bits” from a citizen’s perspective decreased by ~37%. Except different constituents use different services. Somebody’s favorite government function just got cut in half or even whacked off. So now he’s mad. And if he decides that government is just a thief now, & demands more cuts, and you cut another 30% from what remains, well, now that’s actually almost half of the remaining “useful bits,” and more citizens get mad, because government’s value to them is dropping faster than their tax bill. “Why have a government at all?” They ask. Eventually they’re down to the part that just drives around in cars writing tickets and collecting fines, and that part is armed and won’t go away.
But if you raise taxes and add services, and do it in ways that provide value to as much of the general populace as you can helpl, voters will find that the utility of government to them goes up at a higher rate than their tax bill did.
Having politicians constantly cut taxes in the 1980’s and 1990’s got us in trouble there.
Brilliant!!
The same concept is well-known in business. Somehow the ideologues never thought it might possible apply to government too. Or more accurately, they knew from their business experience exactly how to set government onto a collapsing spiral of ever crappier customer service leading to ever angrier customers.
With the eventual goal of the “starved beast” and the corresponding free-fire zone for fatcats.
There is an old Chinese adage that the best form of government is the most corrupt. They come around once a year and collect the taxes, and the rest of the time, they leave you alone.
Um. As someone whose favorite president was FDR (except for that nasty internment bit), I’m very much for a bigger government.
Also - a lot of the reason that there’s so many annoying regulations and situations like the one mentioned above with more than half of the school system not teaching, and people who are assigned to make sure the paperwork is done, &c, is because of efforts to prevent waste and corruption.
Example: Say I work for the state of CA (I actually do). Let’s say that they decide that the employees should be given a box of tissues for their desk, because our work is boring and tedious and our boss is mean and so all of us cry a lot. Not a big deal, it’s a really really minor perk, something that many businesses would provide out of hand without thinking about it. Now, that means about 3 boxes of Kleenex (or, more realistically, off-brand Kleenex) per year, per person. There are 140,000 people working for the state government - if Kleenex costs $1/box, that means that they’re paying $420k per year just for Kleenex.
Then someone in the “small government” camp raises a huge fuss. “We’re paying $420k of YOUR money just so those lazy state workers can have KLEENEX at their desks AT ALL TIMES! GOVERNMENT WASTE! EXCESSIVE SPENDING!!! Also, nobody is keeping track of how many boxes people get, so people are STEALING this Kleenex for home use which was bought with YOUR MONEY!!!” And there’s an expose in the Times or the Bee or something, and because this perk which is individually just a tiny thing to make our lives easier has become so huge because of the scale of it, it gets taken away, and now when our boss yells at us till we cry we have to blow our nose into our sleeves. Then State workers get a reputation for all having dirty sleeves.
Um. What was I talking about? Oh yes. Now we come to the regulations part. So after Kleenexgate and Sleevegate, they decide to bring back the Kleenex at 2 boxes per year instead of 3, but there has to be some way to make sure it’s not just taken home by people who are supposed to be using it at their desk. Which is a fairly reasonable compromise, right? But how do you do that? They develop form 534-KL, which each government worker must fill out to requisition another box of Kleenex, so they can track where the Kleenex money is going. But who is going to process the forms and track who is over-ordering Kleenex for 140k workers? Why, they’ll hire someone, because that’s gonna be a lot of paperwork. That adds, in effect, an additional $25k/year minimum to the Kleenex cost just to provide that oversight and prevent waste and theft. So you saved a total of $115,000 per year after deducting the cost of the wages of the person who is supposed to track the 534-KL forms.
Then the Small Government people get upset again. “DID YOU KNOW,” they say, outraged, “that there is a person whose salary YOU PAY whose only job is to process KLEENEX REQUISITION FORMS? This is why the Government is SO BLOATED AND WASTEFUL!” And the late-night comedians get ahold of it and start making jokes about there even needing to be a 534-KL form, and what sort of person would even take that job, &c.
I could go on.
Many people complain about how poorly governmental things are run, and so they ask for their budget to be cut. “Why should we pay them all that money if they are doing a bad job?” they ask, not realizing that the reason why they are doing such a bad job is because they weren’t given enough money to hire competent people to run the program. People are averse about throwing money into the pit of government that hasn’t been capable of providing the returns they expect, but instead of lowering their efficiency expectations and giving them more money so they get the level of government service they want, they will take money away from the government and somehow think that this will improve the matter.
In a more concrete example, how many people complain about how long the line is when they renew their driver’s license? What might make their service faster? Having more money to hire more clerks. Having more money to pay the current employees more so there is less turnover and more competent people staying on the job. Having more money to hire competent administrators out from private enterprise jobs to oversee all of this. Sure, you can complain about “high” taxes and the wait, and think the wait should be shorter given the taxes you’re paying, but doing so implies that you would rather just have drivers be unlicensed. If you think throwing money at the government to try to solve the problems it has been given to solve is a waste, then you might as well support the complete removal of the entirety of government and call for rule by corporations. It’s what we’re basically living under already in all but name.
Good post up to the excerpted point.
If the corps are all powerful then government is too small and we need more. If the government is crushing the corps preventing their basic business success then government is too big and we need less.
Simultaneously believing the corps are ruling everything but yet gov’t is too powerful is fantasy, cynicism, or both.
This rates my sig.
ETA: Which sig fell off when I edited the post. Hmm.
Here. FTR:
Telling people who already have trouble meeting their tax bill that government services are poor because they are too cheap to pay enough says more about the incompetence of government than about the taxpayers. If the current level of funding(30-40% of GDP at all levels) is too little, then we have a serious problem, and it’s not that taxpayers don’t pay enough money.
Saw this list elsewhere, and thought it relevant. Lists the states with the highest percentage of citizens receiving Social Security disability benefits. (Not sure if it includes SSI. And does not appear to include VA disability. I can’t vouch for accuracy.) Not a blue state among them. I’m sure a good portion of folk in those states - including those receiving disability benefits - would express (and vote for) a desire for a smaller government.
Our agency has been experiencing a hiring freeze straightjacket the past couple of years - which looks to continue indefinitely. When I started this particular job 5 years ago (after 25 years with the same agency), I had 2 competent staff assigned to me. Now, I share 10 staff with 8 colleagues. The work is assigned by alphabet, so I am not able to get the efficiencies of familiarity with particular staff. At least 5 of the 10 are grossly incompetent. (Most of them worst were hired on veterans’ preference. It was thought better to have warm bodies in slots than to leave them unfilled.) As workloads get heavier, the most competent staff leave, and are not replaced. So not only is the total number of staff lower, but the average competence is lower as well.
Personally, I’m doing less work of lower quality than at any time since I began 5 years ago. I could work around the clock, and cut all manner of corners, and still not make a dent in the backlog. So, instead, I do what I consider to be a fair fulltime job’s effort. Meanwhile, the backlog of work continues to grow.