Newt Gingrich hasn't officially returned to politics yet, but that hasn't stopped him from running against the government. “We need to rip apart every single government bureaucracy,” he told Norfolk, Va.-area Republicans yesterday, according to a report in the Virginian-Pilot. “We’ve replaced government for the people with government for the government.”
It's enough to make you wonder why Gingrich didn't solve that problem when he was speaker of the House and his party controlled both houses of Congress. But actually, we know the answer to that question, don't we? First, because it's really, really hard to do. And second, because when you start pulling the lid off all of these agencies and programs, it turns out a lot of them are doing their jobs pretty well, and almost all of them have strong constituencies that even the most hardcore government-hater can't afford to alienate. That's why anti-bureaucracy talk like this (from all sides of the political spectrum, by the way) has always been more about rhetoric than reality.
Jul 13, 2007
The Bureaucracy
Tom Shoop runs the excellent FedBlog. It is worth reading on any day. I think this post that he made applies very well to Social Security:
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2 comments:
"It's enough to make you wonder why Gingrich didn't solve that problem when he was speaker of the House and his party controlled both houses of Congress."
Remember he tried, but Bubba shut down the government.
If Gingrich focused more on his bloated (and ever expanding) wasteline rather than his ill-conceived "war" on bloated government, he'd probably be a lot less whiny (and probably add 15 more years to his life).
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