Couldn't find an open thread and I wanted to send a shout out to Steve Gilliard. He has got it right in his post
fumbling toward failure:.
Which is why the meme of waste, fraud and abuse was so popular in the late 80's and 90's. People wanted to believe government was pissing their money away. They wanted someone to blame. And since Reagan had provided the subtext that the money was going to the underserving poor, it was an easy campaign to sell.
The Dems never really answered it, they never defended government and explained how efficent it was in reality. They were scared off from doing so by the think tanks. Grover and Steve and the rest of the Olin/Scaife mafia was making a cottage industry convincing the public that the market solved all problems.
Every time somebody says to me all politicians are corrupt I explain to them that they are telling me my mother was corrupt, and she wasn't. Every time somebody complains about taxes I explain to them that I like to pay taxes because they pave the roads. I don't know enough to talk about efficiencies of scale, or direct control of the distribution of goods and services, but if I look out my window, I believe that we can offer more and offer better when the bottom line is not always a dollar sign and more often a sign of health.
Read Steve these days, he's angry and on fire.