While acknowledging “government isn’t the solution to every problem,” Warren says that she hopes to one day ask Grimm: “Would you rather fly in an airplane without the Federal Aviation Administration checking air traffic control? Would you rather swallow a pill without the Food and Drug Administration testing drug safety? Would you rather defend our nation without a military and fight fires without our firefighters?”
Warren nails it. The collective thinking of today’s conservatives accounts for little more than magic wand waving, the dangerous belief that if we eliminate all forms of the federal government, all our problems will vanish into thin air. Rarely does campaign rhetoric move policy, no matter how soaring its high notes, but campaign words do have the ability to wreak immeasurable havoc on a country, and it’s arguable that the most damaging 11 words ever uttered by a U.S. president are Reagan’s “government is not part of the solution, government is the problem.” Or how about Reagan’s other famous line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Those two phrases have blanketed an entire generation of Republicans with hypocritical habits
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Hypocrisy allows Republicans to ignore that it was the federal government that built the great American middle class through labor laws, reforms in the financial and banking industry, and a progressive tax code that shared the prosperity. It was also the federal government that created the interstate highway system, so that private enterprise could deliver to expanded markets. We tackled poverty with Social Security and Medicare, and on and so on. But instead of trying to starve the government or drown it in the bathtub, “we need to tackle our problems head-on, and that will require better government.”
How Hypocrisy Is Simply Not a Factor in the Right-Wing Mind | Alternet
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