Our political discourse needs more Paul Krugman
“Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?Just like Joe the unlicensed assistant plumber told us!
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
3 comments:
Attwater is dead, and I'm glad. Plus we got a bonus schadenfreude in the form of a sniveling, desperate last minute apology for being a waste of a perfectly good rectum.
everyone hate govt until they need it - you need that people who voted for Bush are the first in line for the handouts like from FEMA
Goes back before that. My boss in 1972, the first year I could vote, told me over and over, "McGovern's gonna take a thousand dollars OF MY MONEY and give it to a ni**er!" If I heard it once I heard it 40 times. I've been hearing variations of it ever since.
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