Gulp. This is going to be a long four years.
Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same. Much of that economic growth was real, but for the past five years or so, it has borne a suspicious resemblance to Bernie Madoff's stock fund. Americans have been living high on borrowed money (the savings rate dropped from 7.6 percent in 1992 to less than zero in 2005) while financiers built castles in the air.(*)
In other words, Americans want big government without big government. They want to have their cake and to eat it too.
Please wake up, friends to the south. You're being slipped the roofie of socialism and it's going to give you one hell of a hangover. Take it from a country that knows about expensive social programs and the damage that welfarism can do.
H/t Darcey
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