One Nation, Subsidized - Time Magazine - By Michael Grunwald

Reproduced here in its entirety for fair use and discussion purposes. My responses interlaced in bold.

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One Nation on Welfare. Living your life on the dole - By Michael Grunwald

The sun is shining in Miami Beach, and I wake up in subsidized housing. l throw on a T shirt made of subsidized cotton, brush my teeth with subsidized water and eat cereal made of subsidized grain.

Soon the chaos begins, two hours of pillow forts, dance parties and other craziness with two hyper kids and two hyper Boston terriers, until our subsidized nanny arrives to watch our 2-year-old. My wife Cristina then drives to her subsidized job while listening to the subsidized news on public radio. I bike our 4-year-old to school on public roads, play tennis on a public court and head home for a subsidized shower. Then I turn on my computer with subsidized electricity and start work in my subsidized home office.

It's just another manic Monday; brought to us by the deep pockets of Big Government. The sunshine is a natural perk, and while our kids are tax deductible, the fun we have with them is not: The dogs are on our dime too. Otherwise, taxpayers help support just about every aspect of our lives. (If all of us are supporting each other, why not have all of us just keep what we have and not circulate it through government? And by the way, is the "help" voluntary? Did anyone get asked if they want to help?)

Of course, we're taxpayers too, and we don't exactly fit the stereotype of entitled welfare queens. Cristina is an attorney and until recently was a small-business owner. I'm a journalist, an economic red flag these days, but I work for the company behind the Harry Potter and Batman movies, so at press time I was still getting paid. My family's subsidies are not the handouts to the poor that help fuel America's political culture wars but the kind of government goodies that make the comfortable even more comfortable.

Our federally subsidized housing, for example, is a two story Art Deco home in the overpriced heart of South Beach. But our mortgage interest is a personal deduction, my home office is a business deduction, and federal subsidies keep our flood insurance cheap. Even our property taxes are deductible. So thanks for your help. (Deductions are not subsidies.)

The 2012 election is shaping up as a debate over Big Government, but it is only loosely tethered to the reality of Big Government. The vast majority of federal spending goes to defense, health care, and Social Security, plus interest payments on the debt we've run up paying for defense, (This is a common liberal meme, that the military is funded by debt. However, one can only arrive at this conclusion by deeming one's preferred government programs as funded, thereby allowing one to categorize disdained programs like the military as being funded by debt.)

health care and Social Security. Nondefense discretionary spending - Washingtonese for "everything else," from the FBI to the TSA to the center for grape genetics---amounts to only 12% of the budget. (This little acknowledgment is allowed to pass, but it ought to scare everyone. Social Security in particular is the elephant in the room, gobbling up gargantuan amounts of money, and that's increasing daily. Soon SS will eat 100% of the budget.)

Still, it's a big government. The U.S. did not spend even $1 billion in 1912; it will spend $3.8 trillion in 2012 on everything from Missing Alzheimer's Disease Patient Assistance ($593,843) to Snow Survey and Water Supply Forecasting ($9,409,400), from mortgage insurance for manufactured homes ($64,724,187) to iron worker training on Indian reservations. These will be an additional $1.3 trillion in tax expenditures, federal benefits (like the deductions for my 401(k) (It is interesting how he phrases this. Deductions are termed “federal benefits,” like a welfare payment or a bailout. The fact is, it is his money first. He earned it. It is his. The fact the government chose not to take it from him is not a benefit. Him keeping his own money ought to be his right.) 

and my nanny's salary) that are basically identical to those normal spending programs except that they happen to be provided through the tax code.

The rise of the Tea Party and the weakness of the Obama economy have fueled a Republican narrative about Big Government as a threat to liberty, redistributing wealth from honorable Americans to undeserving moochers, from taxpaying "makers" to freeloading "takers.” (Big government is a threat to liberty. Indisputable. But beyond that, there is no such narrative that wealth is being redistributed from “honorable Americans” to “undeserving moochers.” The narrative is that government is creating a class of people who is deems as more worthy of your money than you are. 

There are many who are hurting and are struggling financially. They are not moochers. They are in need. However, it is for compassionate people, giving because they are moved in their heart to do so, that will help these people. Government should not, and in fact, has proven it can not, improve the lives of the poor.)

In fact, most Americans are makers and takers - proud of our making, blind to our taking. Republicans often point out that only half the country pays income taxes, but just about all Americans pay taxes: payroll taxes, state and local taxes, gas taxes and much more. (Diversionary tactic. The original point that nearly half of Americans pay no income tax, and therefore have no stake in the scaling back of Big Government, remains true. The fact that the poor pay numerous other taxes is irrelevant. 

Also, this is a problem that manifests from Big Government. Big Government creates burdens on the poor, not just financially, but in terms of culture and society. Witness the devastation of the poor in the inner city. These problems belong squarely at the feet of government.) 

The problem is that we pay in $2.5 trillion and pay out $3.8 trillion. And these trillions of dollars don't all go to undeserving moochers, (Well of course not. No one has said they do. And, "we," as in government, spends more than it takes in because it cannot control spending. It's a spending problem.) 

except insofar as we're all undeserving moochers. (The federal government is mandated by the Constitution to provide certain enumerated duties. All the rest is left to the states, or the people. The people delegate certain agreed duties to state and local governments. None of this makes us moochers, except to the degree that the government forces us to accept its beneficence.)

The Right routinely portrays government as a giant mess of Solyndra failures, lavish agency conferences in Vegas and pork for society's leeches. But my taxpayer-supported morning didn't feel like mooching at the time.

For example, my family pays for that water I use to brush my teeth, about $100 a month. But that's a small fraction of the true cost of delivering clean water to our home and treating the sewage that leaves our home. (And who pays the rest? Government has no money of its own. It must first help itself to the contents of someone else’s pocket in order to pay for that clean water you drink. Why should the author, rich enough to afford a nanny, have his water subsidized?) 

And it certainly doesn't reflect the $15 billion federal project to protect and restore the ravaged Everglades, which sit on top of the aquifers that provide our drinking water. Most Americans think of the water that comes out of our faucets as an entitlement, not a handout, but it's a government service, and it's often subsidized. (This does not make the case that it should be subsidized, however. As far as what “most Americans” believe, that is another issue. But beyond that, most clean water is provided by local and county governments, not the feds. What people might support has a lot to do with how much the federal government has involved itself in local affairs, funded by local people to local governments.)

Similarly, my family pays more than $200 a month for the electricity that powers our toaster at breakfast. But that number would be much higher if the feds didn't subsidize the construction, liability insurance and just about every other cost associated with my utility's nuclear power plant (Can we ask why it costs so much to build a nuclear plant? Would it have anything to do with onerous government regulation and permitting, as well as court awards that drive up the cost of that liability insurance? And can we also ask how many nuclear plants have been built in the last 20 years? Is the answer, like, zero?) 

while also providing generous tax advantages ("depletion allowances,” "intangible drilling costs" and so forth) for natural gas and other fossil fuels. The $487 we're paying this year for federal flood insurance is also outrageously low, considering that our low-lying street floods all the time, that a major hurricane could wipe out Miami Beach and that the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America estimates that premiums in high-risk areas would be three times as high without government aid. (Would the author care to explain why he thinks he should not pay for him to live in a risky area? Why should someone in Montana or New York subsidize his lavish lifestyle?)

Some federal largess - tax breaks for NASCAR racetracks ($40 million) and subsidies for rum distilleries ($172 million and rural airports ($200 million - is just silly. There's no reason my poker buddies should be able to deduct the gambling losses I inflict on them once a month (just kidding, guys!). (The author has yet to justify any of his "subsidies.)

The silliest handouts that brighten my morning are the boondoggles that funnel billions to America's cotton and grain farmers and maybe knock a few cents off the price of my T shirts and my kids' breakfast waffles. (Ahh, here we have a swerve into the truth: He may deem himself a moocher on the government dole, but many of the things he chronicles amounts to pennies of subsidies. He would hardly miss the small amount of increase in some products when they are no longer subsidized. 

But even if such a circumstance happened, we might not even experience any fallout from government abandoning its interventionist policies. Once the government has released its stranglehold on the economy, it will equalize and adjust. Quite likely, the cost of goods will go down once business is freed to offer products people actually want to buy in the form they want to buy them.)

Uncle Sam sends at least $15 billion every year to farmers and agribusinesses in the form of grants, loans, crop insurance and other goodies. The farm lobby is so omnipotent in Washington that when the World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. handouts give our cotton farmers an unfair advantage over Brazil, the U.S. cut a deal to shovel $147 million a year to Brazilian cotton farmers rather than kick our own farmers off the dole. Our food and clothing may seem cheap, but, oh, we pay for them.

Reasonable people can disagree about most government aid. I enjoy NPR, even though I don't really see why it needs about $3 million a year of our tax dollars to produce good journalism; public radio stations receive only about 15% of their revenue from the government anyway. (What, they don’t get all these other subsidies and benefits you have been chronicling in your article? They don’t get subsidized water or highways? 

But this tells only part of the equation, anyway. There are a variety of funding tentacles that connect Public Radio and Public television to the taxpayer. And it is on principle that conservatives object to government funding of the news, as well as the obvious fact that Big Bird makes more money than Romney does. He doesn't need taxpayer funding. Constitutionally speaking, he shouldn't have it.) 

On the other hand, I thank my $500 Florida tax rebate for the energy efficient water heater that warms my shower made great sense, promoting economic, environmental and national security by reducing fossil fuel use. (Has fossil fuel use actually reduced? No. Is it a constitutional activity of government to modify our behaviors as to what products we buy? No. Should we accept that government knows better than us what is good for us? No!)

Unless you're a hardcore libertarian, it probably doesn't bother you that the city of Miami Beach spends $500 million a year building roads, fixing potholes, picking up trash, putting out fires and creating bike lanes that make my cycling somewhat less life-threatening. (It doesn't take a”hardcore libertarian” to know that there is a large difference between the voter-approved activities of local and state governments, and the unconstitutional activities of the federal government.) 

The city also owns my local tennis courts, which are receiving a somewhat controversial $5 million upgrade, as well as the playground my 2 year old visits frequently and the track where Cristina and I work out much less frequently My mayor, Matti Herrera Bower, told me tennis players are the city's most aggressive and obnoxious special interest. We're the farmers of Miami Beach. (Indeed, it's this entitlement mentality, which the government is all to happy to play into in order to get power and pay off valuable constituents for their votes, that has brought us to the brink of financial ruin.)

When I spoke to Bower, a former dental assistant and PTA mom who got into politics after years of community activism, the FBI had just busted a bunch of city code inspectors for shaking down a nightclub owner, (Which brings up the obvious question, who protects us from the abuses of a too big and oppressive government when it goes out of control?) 

and the city manager had just quit. “MIAMI BEACH SINKING IN A VAST SWAMP OF DISHONESTY,” a Miami Herald column declared. Citizens notice the bad news, Bower said with a sigh, but they don't appreciate that government keeps them safe and cleans their streets (Notice how the subject is changed. Government officials involved in illegal activities is magically transformed into the innocuous street cleaning). 

They're not too interested in learning more, either; Bower holds regular Mayor on the Move forums to bring City Hall to Miami Beach's neighborhoods but only two residents showed up to the last one. "There's this perception that government is all dirty, and perception is 99% of what matters," Bower says. "People are busy living their lives. They don't understand where their taxes go and what they get." (In other words, people are so stupid. They don’t understand stuff. They just don’t get how government takes such good care of them. 

But in actual fact, she is right that people want to live their lives. A law-abiding citizen, pursuing their private interests, should not have to pay attention to what government is doing. Government should not have that level of power. Government forces us to think about it every day. We are forced to save receipts for our taxes, to check if we’re in the city limits before we use our cell phones, we are forced to check with government before filling a puddle with dirt. 

Government inserts itself into our lives in so many little ways, and people just don’t want to deal with it. They want to be left alone, and they want to make their own lives and not be told what their doing is offensive, bigoted, fattening, or harmful to the snail darter.)

One thing my family gets from government is Cristina's paycheck from an advocacy group called Americans for Immigrant justice, which is nearly 30% funded by the feds. Cristina is paid less than she would make at a private law firm, though more than most Americans, to represent undocumented minors in detention centers - in other words, kids in jail some as young as 6, many victims of gang rape, gang terror or horrific family abuse. Cristina helps save the time of judges and immigration officials by advising these kids about their rights, and she probably saves taxpayers money overall by advising her clients when they have no legal case for staying. (In other words, because of the huge bureaucracy and plethora of government activities, it is so wasteful and bloated that the author can justify his wife’s government job because it alleviates what government itself has created.) 

That said, it's unlikely that her job would exist without Uncle Sam's help.

This is true for huge numbers of Americans. Government is still America's largest job sector, directly employing about 22 million workers at the federal, state and local levels - which means teachers, cops, prison guards, park rangers, coroners, prosecutors, you name it. It is impossible to estimate how many jobs the federal government creates indirectly (Government does not create jobs. It creates employment by obtaining its funding from the private sector. The private sector then does not have money to hire as many people, or to make a capital purchase, or to invest in a new factory. The government is a parasite and creates nothing.) 

through contracts for everything from fighter jets to the guys who manage my tennis courts. Other industries depend on government, like health care, lobbying and Washington real estate. (This is simply wealth redirected. Of course government money attracts other entities. But this is not new wealth, for government does not create wealth. This is simply a variation of the Broken Window Fallacy.)

And the entire nonprofit world depends on the charitable tax deduction which costs the Treasury about $40 billion a year. (No, no, no! Money that the taxpayer gets to keep costs the government nothing! It is not entitled to the money. The only party that gets stuck with any cost is the taxpayer.)

Obama proposed to limit it for rich donors, but charities went berserk, and with anti tax Republicans running the House, Congress isn't eliminating tax breaks these days.

That's especially true of the tax breaks that deprive the Treasury (No, no, no! The Treasury is not entitled to our money. It is our money, and the Treasury takes it from us. When it does not take it, it is because it belongs to taxpayers.) 

of the most revenue because they tend to go to taxpayers with the most income. Take that mortgage - interest deduction, the third ­costliest tax expenditure at $94 billion a year. It's available only to homeowners, who tend to be better off than renters. And since it's a deduction from your income, it's worth more to taxpayers who earn more. That's because the higher your income, the higher your tax bracket, and if you are in the top brackets, you can deduct a bigger portion of your mortgage interest from your taxes Politicians love providing benefits through the tax code because it makes them look like tax cutters rather than spenders, And a politician who tried to get rid of the mortgage deduction would probably become an ex-politician (The lack of courage from politicians is nothing new. Neither is their spendthrift habits. This must change if the republic is to survive, however.)

I usually spend most of the afternoon in my office, with occasional soccer breaks when 2 year old Lina bangs on my door and shouts, "Kick ball me!" I often grab lunch with a friend – maybe Xavier, a private-equity guy, or Damian, a developer, or Alan, an environmental activist. I do physical therapy twice a week for a bum shoulder, Except for my escape with Lina, who'd be a more convincing athlete if she didn't carry a doll onto the field, this is all subsidized too.

The physical therapy is helping my aching shoulder, but it's also helping drive the U.S. toward insolvency. We're not Greece or anything like Greece, but we do have a long-term debt problem, and it's almost entirely a result of rising health care costs (No it’s due almost entirely to the fact that government spends $.49 of every health care dollar. It is the 600 pound gorilla in the room, it controls the agenda, it is the powerbroker. Its involvement in the healthcare market has caused nearly all of the problems it now purports to solve.)

On graphs of long-term government ­spending projections, health care looks like a ski slope, and everything else looks like a sidewalk. Most of the problem is Medicare and Medicaid, which spend about $800 billion and rising a year to cover the elderly and the poor. But the tax advantages for health care are the country's costliest tax expenditure, draining the Treasury of $84 billion a year. (Or maybe I can utilize the author’s technique and deem the government healthcare expenditure as debt spending, since I consider other programs to be funded by revenues, thus leaving these programs as the cause of the debt crisis.)

Health benefits provided by employers are tax exempt, which encourages Time Inc. to give me better benefits than it otherwise might have. That may have encouraged me to get my shoulder checked out earlier than I otherwise would have, which might save me from costly surgery. Then again, my orthopedist might not have done an MRI in addition to an X ray if I didn't have such comprehensive insurance; when the tax code rewards a behavior, like consuming health care, people do more of that behavior. (And here we have illustrated for us the quintessential problem of massive government intervention into the economy and peoples’ lives. There is no possible way for government to control all the behaviors and outcomes of its private sector interventions. 

On one hand, maybe costs are lowered or a benefit is provided. On the other hand, another industry is affected, or behavior is changed, or a hand is shoved out for a gimmee. Because it isn't possible for government to control the ripple effects of its policies,, the government pretends these effects don’t exist. 

Therefore, a $200 billion tax hike is expected to produce $200 in revenue, but doesn’t because people change their behavior to avoid the tax. A ban on soft drinks doesn’t reduce obesity, it increases the number of smaller drinks sold. A tax on cigarettes doesn’t generate more revenue or reduce smoking. It simply drives people to make their purchases where the taxes are lower.)

I also benefit from another huge loophole in the tax code: the exemption for 401(k)s and other savings plans, which costs the Treasury $138 billion a year (Another example of the false idea that government is entitle to our money and only lets us keep it because it is beneficent.) 

Every $500 I save for retirement depletes the Treasury (Here he goes again…) 

of about $135 it would otherwise take from me in taxes. Yes, there is a legitimate policy interest in promoting saving, (There is?) 

but this is another example of the tax code incentivizing people with money to do things they would have done anyway, like own a home, buy health insurance or hire a nanny. (If these are things people will do anyway, how are they incentives?) 

Investors and financiers also enjoy huge tax advantages like Wall Street's $1 billion to $2 billion carried interest loophole, which keeps hedge­fund managers' taxes at janitor level. (Typical of many on the left, top marginal rates get confused with total taxes paid. Janitors on the whole pay a lower tax rate than the rich, as well as an infinitesimally small raw dollar amount compared to the rich.)

But my sweetest tax advantage does not come from being a homeowner, a patient or a saver, it comes from being a kinda-sorta businessman. If you make decent money and you're not deducting business expenses, get an accountant - which, incidentally, is also tax-deductible. On my tax forms, I’m not just a dude at a magazine, I'm also an "author, lecturer," which lets me slice some personal business expenses off the top of my income. I'm conservative about deductions - nothing to see here, IRS! (This is part of the conservative case for limited government. Even the author gives in to fear about what the government can do to him if they perceive him to make a misstep. Government that has the power to do this is a government ripe for stripping of that power.)

- ­but my accountant says those business-­ish lunches with my work related pals are partly deductible. So are most books I buy, 17% of my utility bills – my home office is 17% of our home - and some of my travel. I don't know how much I'll deduct from my trip to San Francisco for my brother's wedding, but it won't be nothing because I did some book interviews while I was there.

The business community frequently complains about taxes, but the tax code turns out to be cluttered with pro business incentives (As well it should be, since business is the engine of prosperity. More important, business taxes get passed to the final consumer as a part of the product’s pricing. So businesses do not pay any tax at all. The individual bears the burden of all taxes.) 

In fact, as we discovered when Cristina opened a retail store just as the recession hit, the only thing that's more advantageous for tax purposes than opening a business is opening a failing business. When the store lost money during the Great Recession, the losses helped reduce our tax liability by more than half. We learned an expensive lesson in entrepreneurial risk taking, but Uncle Sam made it much less expensive. (For you, yes. But for someone else, well, they paid for yours.)

The workday ends. Cristina drives home, past a $49 million federally funded rail tunnel, and gets cash from our bank, which was bailed out to the tune of $45 billion by the U.S. government. Our nanny takes a public bus home. Then it's another hour of gymnastics, charades and other unsubsidized fun before we deposit the kids in front of the T.V. - riot to watch mindless crap, because we would never tranquilize them that way, but to watch worthy programs like Dinosaur Train and Sid the Science Kid that tend to be supported by federal grants. It's a much better way to tranquilize them.

My life on the dole is hardly unique. The website cfda.gov lists 2238 federal assistance programs, from the $7.5 million Incentive Gran to Prohibit Racial Profiling to the $4 million Wild Horse and Burro Resource Management. Redundancies jump off the screen. The $24 billion-a-year agriculture Department is essentially running a bonus government for rural America with its own education, housing, transportation, energy, health, business promotion and environmental regulation programs. The $2.5 billion a year Bureau of Indian Affairs supports a duplicate government for Native Americans. I suggested to one Administration official that the $662 billion the Pentagon spends on service members, their families and veterans is yet another U.S. government. "No, the Pentagon runs a Swedish government," he corrected me. "It's a socialist paradise!"

Government investment affects our lives in all kinds of subtler ways, from the Pentagon research that led to the development of the internet (This is false. Private enterprise laid the groundwork for the internet.) 

to the one-sided deal that subsidized a $213 million arena for the basketball team I root for obsessively. Americans Tell pollsters they don't like government, much less the taxes they pay to fund government, but they tend to support Medicare, the military, (A constitutionally mandated activity.)

and most other services government provides. This is why politicians tend to spend a lot of time talking about shrinking government than actually shrinking government. President Obama talks a lot about trimming the fat, and Republican leaders talk about almost nothing but trimming the fat. But the status quo has largely prevailed (This is a political problem, not a failure of small government advocates. If people were educated in economics rather than kept ignorant by the public schools and writers such as the author, perhaps they would realize that their votes are being bought by these programs, and every single one of them is paid for by someone else, whose money was forcibly extracted from them to fund the societal objectives of government.)

The explosion of Big Government under Obama is mostly a myth; the public workforce has actually shrunk by half a million workers during his presidency. (Another popular myth among the Left. Government debt has increased over $6 trillion in the last four years. That means government has been too big for the revenue it has taken in. Maybe its absolute size has not increased, but clearly it has spent a huge amount more than it has taken in, which conclusively means it is too big.) 

That said, Obama hasn't been much of a fat trimmer, either. His halfhearted efforts to rein in excessive spending got off to a laughable staxt in April 2009, when he publicly ordered his Cabinet to find $100 million–with–an-m worth of waste to cut; a rounding error in a $3.6 trillion–with–a-t budget. He later killed a $143 million fighter jet the Pentagon didn't want as well as a $190 million maritime navigation system rendered obsolete by GPS, then agreed to more than 2 trillion in long-range cuts after Republicans threatened to force the Treasury into default in 2011. (More left wing spin. If two sides cannot come together in agreement, it always seems to be the Republicans are the ones blamed. But this is a two party system, and had the Democrats gave in, there would have been no crisis.)

But those cuts are still mostly theoretical, depending on what happens in the fall election. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has rallied around House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's long term blueprint for deep and specified deficit-expanding tax cuts (Another left-wing spin. Tax cuts do not expand the debt.) 

paired with deep (but mostly unspecified) cuts in nondefense spending. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney embraced the Ryan plan during the primaries and then put Ryan on his ticket, but he has been even cagier about what he intends to cut beyond small-dollar Republican targets like Amtrak and NPR. (Contrast that with Obama's plan, which is really not a plan, which has worsened our situation and plunged us toward the brink of bankruptcy.)

Independent analysts have suggested that if the U. S. actually followed the Ryan outline, by 2050 there would be no room in the budget for anything but defense, Social Security and health care. (Which will also happen in 2025 if we leave it as is.)

But even if Republicans take back Washington, cutting isn't a foregone conclusion; government spending exploded when they controlled the nation's capital in the Bush era. (Which is why the TEA party came to be. Conservatives have been very critical of the big spenders during the Bush administration. That is why the TEA party is so effective. It is no a force that can actually hold politicians’ feet to the fire.) 

Every line item has lobbyists watching its back, (Exactly. With so much money at stake, lobbyists can hardly be blamed to attempt to pry money out of government.)

and when you can get a reputation as a fiscally responsible budget cutter without doing the politically difficult budget cutting, why bother?

My family’s asleep. I’m reading the mail, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service, which is hemorrhaging cash in the e-mail era. The USPS is a classic example of a problem Washington can't fix. It clearly needs to cut costs and raise revenues. But the obvious cost reducers, like ending Saturday snail ­mail delivery and closing rural post offices, and the obvious revenue enhancer, increasing stamp prices, are DOA on Capitol Hill.

Liberals are correct that we rely on government much more than we realize. Conservatives are correct that government tries to do too many things. Republicans have seized on the Obama campaign's Life of Julia online tool, showing how one woman might benefit from Head Start, tuition aid, Medicare and other federal programs during her life, to accuse Democrats of viewing Americans as cradle-to-­grave wards of the state. Democrats have portrayed Republicans as anti-government absolutists in thrall to the Tea Party, eager to deprive Americans of benefits we like and expect. There's some truth in those critiques too.

But those of us who think government has an important role to play in American life ought to support reining in the excesses that give government a bad name. (This is a false choice. Conservatives are not anarchists.) 

When I asked analysts at the anti-government (A false characterization. The Cato Institute is a libertarian organization dedicated to constitutionally-limited government. It is not anti-government.) 

Cato Institute and the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities what was the most wasteful government spending, they all gave the same answer: farm subsidies. A coalition of taxpayer activists and green groups recently proposed axing $700 billion worth of environmentally destructive federal largess from fossil fuel subsidies to sprawl roads to pork barrel water projects that drain wetlands. There is broad agreement among eggheads that tax perks for yachts, corporate jets and mortgage interest on mansions ought to go as well.

But it's hard to see the finger-in-the-­wind political world following the wonk world's lead. The costliest spending programs affect the military and the elderly. And the costliest tax expenditures affect families like mine. We're the kind of moochers who vote.