print“Shut the hell up”: That’s what you say to the next Republican who bleats at you about the GOP being the party of small government.
If GOPers then argue that governments have grown the world over, but the American government is still the smallest: Yet more lies.
America has far more political appointees in its federal government, some 4,000 in all, than any other developed democracy, according to David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. No one ever really stops to wonder whether, if so many roles can sit empty, all these jobs are needed in the first place. [Of course we wonder out-loud; you just don’t listen]
Presidents used to be free to hand out every job in the government. But in 1881 a spurned office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield. His successor, Chester Arthur, signed into law the act creating the civil service and, with it, the seeds of a permanent bureaucracy that would grow from administration to administration, developing many fine public servants along with an unknown quantity of rot.
In the case that Republicans then tell you that the Democrats have, exclusively, presided over the growth of government that, too, is tummy rot.
“Contrary to popular myth,” wrote James Ostrowski, President of Free Buffalo, in 2002, “every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope, or power—and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.”
“Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.”
The Evil Party and the Stupid Party are a political match made in hell.
Most ludicrous is that these huckster Republicans still believe there’s a case to be made for “small government.” Have they looked at the debt clock? Do they think the American State will ever again be small; can ever be shrunk?
National debt stands at over $28 trillion. Each individual taxpayer owes $225,000—and while government will just print money to satisfy and procure voters—Quantitative Easing ad infinitum—taxpayers will still be expected to pay-up on pains of imprisonment.
The Small-Government ship has sailed and some Republicans don’t even know it.