| This didn't start with Clinton or Obama (interesting you skipped over a much larger contributor). As usual, "Reagan made everything worse". When he was governor of California, he ended free college tuition for the UC state schools, because some hippies at Berkley were protesting the Vietnam war. When he was campaigning for president, he popularized the idea of the "welfare queen", and got poor white people to vote against their own interests because there were some hypothetical single black mothers abusing the system. When he got into office, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, but also a bit for the middle class. He expected that he could use that as an excuse to then cut social programs to keep the budget reasonably balanced, but once people have benefits they don't want to give them up. He was forced to not go through with the cuts, doubling the federal budget deficit, and kicking off the trend of deficit spending (except for a brief period under Clinton in the late 90s that W then squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan). Reagan also perfected the process of: 1. Complain that government programs are bad or inefficient.
2. Use it as an excuse to cut their funding.
3. Government programs get worse as a result.
4. Goto 1. He didn't start any of these trends, but he did ramp them way up, and we've been on that trajectory ever since. |