Our government is too big.

[hedgehog]

I don't mean it in the usual right winger sense of too many people getting too much government aid. (If only that were true!)
No, I mean it in the sense that things are done by people who receive federal paychecks and who spend federal money that the rest of us have no idea about. I read Charlie WIlson's War and saw the movie last night. Whatever your opinion on our aid to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, the critical fact is that at the time the average person had no idea what was going on. I really couldn't tell you what US troops are doing in Afghanistan today! Tell me what US troops are doing in South America where they are supposedly trying to control illegal drugs. Tell me what, if anything, the US is doing in Africa.


It hits much closer to home. It's only because I read DU that I discovered that federal money was being used to finance a mall expansion up in Syracuse.

[Hissyspit]

1. So you mean not so much that government is too big, but that people are ill-informed and

that the government is too secretive.

BTW, be careful about making Charlie Wilson into something he is not: http://www.alternet.org/story/71286

DU is a great alternative source of knowledge and information. Be sure and stick around beyond the Primaries crap and encourage others to do so as well.

[krispos42]

2. It's big in the wrong areas

It's misshapen, really.

[Crabby Appleton]

5. Agreed. nt

[PDJane]

3. Government is too big is some places........

and not big enough in others. It's like when you hit middle age, and the weight you carry shifts places, and you end up looking like a stork or a pear or... The secret government is far too large, and the same people run it as have been running it for years.

The Pentagon is bloated beyond control, the school system is over-regulated and starved. The CIA manages to get funding, but affordable housing doesn't.

It's not a matter of size, exactly, but of political priorities.

[Mojambo]

4. Demand that your government operate more transparently

Obama leans the right way on this particular issue, btw.

[havocmom]

7. Transparency! That is what is missing. Too much done/spent in secret

Not too big, too frigging invisible.

[liberal N proud]

6. Government has become a controlling power and not a providing

It was intended to provide and protect the people and it does neither.

[flashl]

8. There is big government and there are GSEs the private-public institutions

The government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) are a group of financial services corporations created by the United States Congress. Their function is to enhance the flow of credit to targeted sectors of the economy and to make those segments of the capital market more efficient and transparent.

June 28,1990

The Six Trillion Dollar Debt Iceberg

A Review of the Government's Risk Exposure

In a congressional floor speech last spring decrying the cost of the savings and loan S&L) bailout, now estimated at between $150 billion and $300 billion, Representative Major Owens, the New York Democrat, declared that he believed there had never been a single item in peacetime that cost the government so much money ... {A}n examination of the finances of other government-backed agencies indicates that the bailout may be just the tip of a fiscal iceberg about to strike the American taxpayer. The total financial obligation of agencies underwritten by the federal government is now some $5.8 trillion and much of that obligation is in bad shape. ... The $4.2 billion loss at the Federal Housing Administration revealed in May 1989 in a General-Accounting Office.(GAO) audit and the Office of Management and Budgets Om) projection that the losses continue, are just among the latest hint of a vast liability that could land in the lap of taxpayers.

The governments total risk exposure of nearly $6 trillion dollars is more than twice the national debt held by the public and more than five times the annual federal budget countering serious financial problems.

Did you know that GSEs in 1990 had generated nearly $6 trillion dollars of taxpayer debt?

[sandnsea]

9. Some still think Afghanistan won that by themselves

That's why they don't understand when Wright says "God Damn America". They've got no clue what America is doing that should be condemned.

[The2ndWheel]

10. Distant

Everything has to be big. Corporations and governments can only grow in size. We live in a world of, by, and for the institution, since there are more and more people that need more and more things. However, you pay a price for such a world. That price is distance. That price is increasingly mandatory universality, with no direct say in how things function.

[Selatius]

11. The police powers of the federal government and its war making capacity are too big.

Unless we want to find out what it's like to live in the Soviet Union, we should change course.

[stillcool]

12. The Pentagon is the seat of government..

and every government agency has been corrupted. I just watched "Recount". What a sad fucking movie. Memorial Day is a sad fucking day as well. Right about now, it seems like the United States is a sad fucking country.