At a legislative level, the political crusade to reduce government “to the size where they can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” is brilliantly self-sustaining. Both Republicans and conservative Democrats hold up the evils of “Big Government” (read: the non-military/security parts of government) as the rationale to reduce resources for popular programs and when those underfunded programs subsequently underperform, they cite the failure as reason to further demonize government, thus beginning the whole cycle anew.
